


after midnight

by rappaccini



Series: ut malum pluvia [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Allusions to Overdose, Alternate Universe-Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Study, Codependency, Drug Abuse, F/M, Fix-It, Heavy influences from comics canon, M/M, Manipulation, Multi, No Amnesia (fuck amnesia), Pseudo-Incest, Time Travel, Trauma, the 1960s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 10:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 84,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25968040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: The Hargreeves siblings' plan to rehabilitate their sister, and in doing so, save the world, is waylaid when they find themselves scattered throughout Dallas, Texas, in the weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.(Or, a heavily canon-divergent take on Season 2)
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves, Hazel/Agnes Rofa, Klaus Hargreeves/David "Dave" Katz, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves, The Hargreeves Family
Series: ut malum pluvia [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857544
Comments: 185
Kudos: 173





	1. here to stay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [myself tbh](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=myself+tbh).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, I'm salty as all fuck about season 2, and this is my way of reconciling that.

On the twentieth hour of the seventeenth of October, 1963, Allison Hargreeves lands splayed on her side in an alleyway in Dallas, Texas.

She lands alone.

The pressure pops at her eardrums, rendering the first seconds of Allison’s arrival in the past utterly silent, with explosions bursting behind her eyelids. Had she eaten anything more substantial than a scattering of cheese curds from Super Star Lanes, she’d be vomiting. Her entire body is shivering and jerking, as though she’d grabbed hold of a livewire, and when Allison opens her eyes at last, staring down at her hands, she realizes that her acrylic nails had been ripped from the tips of her tingling fingers.

Allison looks up for the first time, at the worn walls of the alley she’s found herself in, wondering, rather strangely, if she might find them embedded there in the brick.

Then, she remembers. 

Allison’s head whips around frantically, searching for her family, but she cannot find them. They are not by her side, nor are they scattered throughout the alley, or in the nearby dumpster.

She scrambles to her feet and wanders out, towards the bright hovering light of the marquee of the movie theater in front of her. _Kiss of the Vampire_ is playing at the Avon, and a pair of stragglers sprint in, thirty minutes late to their showing.

Allison is so dizzied by the sudden foreign street she’s landed on, by the shock of being without her family, that she doesn’t register the make of the cars, or the dates on the posters, or the way the women dress.

It’s only when she charges into a still-open restaurant, sees a flood of pale faces turning to glare at her, sees the arm pointing to the _Whites Only_ sign hanging above the counter, that she realizes _exactly_ when she is.

Allison, to be succinct, is in a nightmare.

One that she’s especially poor-equipped to handle. 

Allison, in the world from which she’d come, thanks to her fame and her fortune and her power most of all, had grown up in a sort of bubble. It’d been like living in a crystal castle, and watching a monster pace outside its walls, its shape warped through the facets of the gem, ever-present, and often-visible, and always, always, _always_ scratching at the door, but never quite able to break in. And because she’d had that luxury provided to her by those walls, because she’d been able to turn away and into the camera lights, she’d pretended it was not there.

Now, the door’s been flung open, and she’s been shaken out of the house and onto the street with hardly a second to react, and the creature has her scent. 

Allison has no money or fame to insulate her from it, no rumor to redirect it. She has only herself.

She’s devoted the bulk of her teen years to fighting monsters, and her childhood to surviving one, but this is something she can’t just fend off with her fists, something she cannot trust that if she bites her tongue and keeps her head down will allow her to remain as she is. 

It’s a creeping pack of invisible wolves nipping at her heels with needle-sharp teeth, as she hurries through a white neighborhood at night, as a jeer drives its way under her skin like a knife, as she slams the heel of her hand into a man’s nose and knows it won’t be enough to deter him, as she realizes that the footsteps behind her aren’t going in the same direction, but are following _her_ in particular, are _speeding up_ as she’s running…

She’s running.

She’s running for her life. 

She’s done it before. Running for her life, she means. But this is different. This is far _worse._ She’s an adult now, she’s not on a mission, she’s all alone and she has no idea where she’s running _to,_ only that the streets are changing around her, and the people are too, and she’s moving into less hostile territory. 

There’s a light on, in a beauty parlor.

Allison sees a chance, and takes it.

The parlor’s been closed since six, but Odessa’s often remains open after closing; the parlor is something of a local landmark, and though on this night it is not being used as a meetingplace for a particular organization, a group of women are still lingering, too engrossed in a conversation to desire to leave.

Nothing short of Allison, sprinting through the door, stinking of sweat and ozone, is enough to interrupt them.

She runs, straight into the arms of the women gathered there, and she doesn’t have to say a word, for them to know, to fall in around her, and to guard her ferociously when the men at her heels burst in after her. 

One of the women at the parlor takes her home, afterwards.

Odessa, for whom the parlor is named, is a kindly older woman getting along in her years, whose husband had passed from a heart attack two years prior, whose three children have all grown up and gone on with their lives, and happen to be of an age with Allison. She has a room to spare, and a protective spirit, so she guides Allison into her home, and once Allison has been reassured again that _yes,_ she is safe here, the last of the adrenaline drains from her and leaves her empty. She collapses on her couch, and sleeps there for a full day and night, so drained she can’t so much as lift her head. 

Allison is unsure of where the _tiredness_ has come from, where this strange cloudy confusion that’s settled on her mind has blown in from, or why her body _itches_ everywhere. 

Five or Klaus could have told her that it’s a side effect of time travel, which is always the most severe to the uninitiated, and always crashes in especially hard after a spike of adrenaline, but neither Five nor Klaus is with her, so she is left to endure the aches alone.

So, she does.

Though the symptoms leave her after a day, and she is finally able to lift herself to her feet and take food down, she spends the next week in a daze. As the shock of everything bears down on her like a rogue wave and sweeps her away, she finds herself enshrouded by a deep, unshakable sadness.

Her family is gone. 

Each and every one of them is gone, and she’d been the only one who’d landed in that alleyway. Perhaps they’d been scattered across millennia, perhaps Allison is the only one who’d been torn loose and they’re all staring around at each other, horrified that she hadn’t materialized among them. Perhaps they’re dead, torn to strings of atoms in the time-between-time, or burned by a rogue flame of the apocalypse that had swept in among them before Five could close the door to 2019. 

And they’re not the only ones. 

Allison can’t stop thinking about Claire. Her baby is dead. She’d burned alive in the apocalypse, and Allison could have been there to hold her close and comfort her, but she wasn’t. Allison could have saved her, but she chose instead to stand still. 

Allison hates herself. She sleeps and wakes and cries and hates herself and she doesn’t want to die, God knows she doesn’t want to die. But she isn’t completely certain if she wants to _live_ either. She’s adrift, and she’s alone, and she’s voiceless, and she’s in one of the worst times for a woman like her to be alone and voiceless. 

But then, a week into her stay, she is sitting on Odessa’s porch, deeply uncomfortable with the warmth of the night. Summer is slow to leave in Texas; even in late October, it’s still warm enough to go outside without anything more than a sweater. The last of the drippy heat clings to her skin like the smothering embrace of an old friend, and Allison isn’t used to this warm humidity; she prefers the thick invigorating chill of March on a lakefront city, a week before it turns to a cinder. 

But she endures it, because the curtain of clouds have pulled away and this is the first night since Allison’s landing that she can stare up at the flat silver face of the moon.

It’s so _strange,_ knowing that no one’s been there yet, that no one’ll _be_ there for another six years, that she even knows that will be the case at all. She wants to tell Odessa, but she’d never understand.

 _But,_ Allison thinks, _it’s still the moon, isn’t it? It’s still here, and it will be here for fifty-six years. It is still the moon, and even this long ago, I am still staring at it, longing to go home._

Some things stay.

She thinks of home that night, as she does every night.

She thinks of the brothers she’d fought with and beside, the sister she’d neglected until it was too late, and then not-too-late, the father whose shadow hangs over them all. She thinks of them, and where they might’ve gone, and she reaches up to brush her fingertips along the fresh bandage around her throat. 

She looks up at the moon, from her place sinking into the depths of her own despair, and decides that she is going to believe in them. She is going to make herself believe that they’re going to come for her. She is going to snatch that shuddering arrow and drag it firmly onto the _live_ side of the meter, and she is going to do something with herself while she waits for them to arrive.

As she had when her father had thrown her in the deep end of the mansion’s pool with her arms tied behind her back, Allison grits her teeth, and teaches herself to swim.

Allison had come to 1963 with nothing but the clothes on her back and the notebook in her pocket. She has no money, no job, no identification, no home, no car, no family. 

She survived the first week on the kindness of strangers. She will not be able to rely on that kindness forever; even if Allison were not keenly aware that sitting around a stranger’s house, eating her food and sleeping in the bed that had belonged to her daughter before she’d moved off to live with her husband in Houston is hardly the font of manners, she would still be prickly and suspicious as ever, always ready for people who are not hers (and it is far too soon, to decide if these might be hers or not) to turn on her. These habits had been entrenched in her deeply, and here, a stranger in a strange land, they're bristling out of her, to form the armor that might protect her while she is trapped here.

She lays awake that night, thinking long and hard about how she is going to do this, how she is going to adapt. How she is going to survive being ordinary.

 _(Ordinary,_ she thinks wryly, hating herself for the way her gut lurches at the thought of going through life the way billions of people do, the way her sister had to up until only days ago, all because twenty-five years ago her father had hissed at Allison to jump, and she hadn’t even bothered to ask “how high?”)

Allison starts on her eighth day in Dallas, with getting a job at Odessa’s, because it is the first place that comes to mind, the first place she knows, the business of the woman she is staying with. And also, because Allison doesn’t have very many skills that one would consider employable, especially now that she’s limited to whistling and whispering, but something she knows for a fact that she can do is hair and nails and makeup (And, to be perfectly honest, she’d rather do hair and nails and makeup and listen to gossip than patch up bullet wounds at Forest Avenue. She’s seen enough blood, thanks).

And she starts on herself.

Allison had come bursting into Dallas looking to all the world like a blatant anachronism, and while that might help her family find her, it will also attract the kind of attention she can’t afford. Hair like hers isn’t done in the sixties, so Allison grits her teeth, dyes it back to black, runs it under a hot comb, and smothers it with a cloud of Aqua Net at the beauty parlor, learning from trial and many, many errors to construct a beehive that is only slightly lopsided. Ears are not pierced three times in the sixties, so she pulls out the studs and combs her hair over her ears. Women do not have tattoos quite like hers in the sixties, so she’s careful to cover it up with cardigans whenever she can. Women do not wear skinny jeans and t-shirts and sports bras and leather jackets and sneakers in styles that do not exist yet. So Allison folds her personal effects up, places them in a box under the bed she’s borrowing, and accepts the dresses generously donated by her benefactor. 

When all’s said and done, Allison looks the part. The style of the time actually suits her quite well, so at least she can look at herself in the mirror and smile a bit, tilting her head to flip her hair over her shoulder and pretending, for just a second, that she’s just accepted a part in a period piece, rather than being forced to live one.

But looking the part isn’t enough. It keeps people from staring, but it doesn’t change the glaring fact that she doesn’t belong here.

Allison wakes up every day knowing it, and goes to sleep knowing it. 

She keeps double-taking at mentions of the March on Washington, which had only happened months ago to everyone around her, and had been a footnote in her history textbook only weeks ago. 

She keeps blinking owlishly at the sight of Kennedy on the television, swallowing thickly as That Day marches closer and closer, wondering why it stirs such dread in her when she knows that everything is ultimately going to be fine, and that life will carry on.

She sits with Odessa, watching _East Side/West Side_ on the television, and can’t focus on the mystery, because _Cicely Tyson_ is on the television, and she’s so _young,_ and in sixty years, Allison will be in the same room as her. 

_(In sixty years, will there be two of me?_ Allison wonders, staring at the ceiling that night, _the me that is twenty-nine and famous and has no idea what is about to happen to her, and the me that is eighty-nine, who never came back and grew old and withered knowing what is about to happen and powerless to stop it, or will I have died by then--)_

(She shuts the thought down. No thanks, none of that. Her family is coming for her, and they will find her, and they will take her home, and together they will save the world, and they will save Claire. And that is the end of it.)

Allison keeps the details of her past close to her chest, guarding her secrets greedily. She keeps talk of where she’s from vague, only answering briefly when she’s prompted, and in this regard she is grateful to be relegated to scribbling away on scraps of paper; this way, her quick answers are expected, and not suspect, and she can make anyone who pries feel a little bad about making the girl who’d cut her throat in a mysterious accident draw attention to her unfortunateness (She keeps her relatively unobstructed ability to whisper to herself; she's quite determined to speak as little as possible, to ensure everything will heal as quickly as it can).

She goes to the movies a lot.

It starts as an excuse: Allison makes a ritual of passing by the theater she’d stumbled in front of a few times each week, so she can duck down the alleyway to check for any signs that her family had flopped in, but keeps finding nothing (And since the alley’s in a white neighborhood, she can’t exactly frequent it nearly as much as she’d like).

But she also just likes going to the movies themselves. She likes sitting up in the balcony, in the dark, and being somewhere where no one has any idea that she doesn’t belong here. With everyone facing the same way, she feels protected from prying eyes, as they’re all directed at _The Haunting_ or _The Kiss of the Vampire_ . The theater provides a sort of protection from the ever-present neon sign attached to her shoulders, blaring to everyone that passes, _look at me! I don’t belong here!_

Then, on Allison’s fifteenth day in Dallas, she finds something she hadn't known she’s been looking for, when the S.J.C.C. come calling on Odessa’s.

Allison peers at the men passing leaflets to the women, plucks one out of the hands of one Mr. Raymond Chestnut, and reads it carefully. That night, she sits in the front row at the first meeting advertised on the page. 

Allison must be honest with herself. She's lied to herself for years, and had dug herself deeper and deeper into a ditch of misery, and so, if she's going to claw her way out of it, she's going to have to tell herself the truth. She's going to have to crack it open, and stare it down, and make herself so unafraid of it that she'll never hide from it again.

So. She's honest with herself: it’s a little to do with guilt.

In the future, Allison had been wealthy and well-known, and deeply, _deeply_ out of touch, and that distance had been ever-present, stretching back before Allison could even remember. Allison had been raised by an ambiguously-European billionaire, a sentient chimpanzee who’d done his doctorate at Oxford, and an android built from the ground-up to resemble a real-life Stepford Wife, with contact with any children not wearing an Academy Uniform strictly restricted to meet-and-greets and press events, the effect of which being: to put it simply, she and Diego had never quite figured out where they’d fit in the world after they’d left home, and she’s sure that if Ben had lived long enough to get the chance to follow in their footsteps, he’d have fallen into the same state of alienation. And the rift between Allison and the world had been even greater; she’d had her crystal palace, and had been content to stay within it, content to use her power to keep herself prominent, but never to lift anyone else up with her.

Allison’s come to a lot of epiphanies about herself in the past few months. This one in particular sticks in her side like a barb, that she could have helped so _many_ people and simply _didn’t,_ because she couldn’t be bothered to. The world had been so small, and it had been all about her, up until very recently. Too recently.

Allison reaches up to her neck, which has healed enough by now to go unbandaged. The puckered purplish line is still tender to the touch, and it pulses angrily under her fingertips.

 _What a waste,_ she thinks. _There isn't a single thing I've used it for that hasn't turned on me, that I haven't ended up regretting._

Then, she shakes her head slightly, as if there were a snow globe inside her skull and she were stirring the glitter within it, and she rises to her feet. The meeting’s disbanded, and she’s coated her pamphlet with notes, and she wants to talk to Mr. Chestnut about them. 

She won’t have her rumor back for weeks, or months, or even years. She has only herself to help with, and luckily, she knows with absolute certainty that these sorts of movements have never needed superheroes. Ordinary people are enough, and have always been enough.

She has only herself to give, and it will be enough. 

Allison hands her pamphlet, with all its chicken scratchings, right back into his hand, and he invites her to dinner to discuss them, and in the space of a single night, Mr. Chestnut becomes Raymond becomes Ray, and Allison has made her first true friend in this strange old world.

Come to think of it, he's her first true friend at _all._ The first one she's ever made completely on her own, the first one she's ever made who hasn't grown up alongside her since birth, whose ear she hasn't whispered in to ensure that he'd like her.

 _I've done it,_ Allison thinks. _I've taken a step, and I've made groundfall_ _._

Here’s the thing: Ray’s a handsome man. He’s incredibly charming, with a sharp wit and a fiery drive and the innate ability to gather a room together and bring them to a consensus, and Allison _likes_ it. She likes _him._

And, as they settle into a quick and immediate camaraderie, fostered over long nights strategizing at his kitchen table, she discovers that he likes her too.

In fact, he likes her in a way that she isn’t ready to like him yet.

When his hand slides across the table, and gently catches her fingers between his, she waits, for just a moment, feeling the warmth gather where they’re touching, imagining some world where she’s been here for years, where she’s lost all hope of her brothers and sister returning to her, where she makes a life here that is permanent, and she knows with absolute certainty that this is who it would be with. This is someone she finds handsome and appealing, who she might be able to talk for hours with, who she might form a _team_ with.

The thing is, this isn’t that world.

The thing is, Raymond likes the performance she is putting on. Allison was once an actress on the screen, but she'd been pretending long before that. She's terrible in front of a camera, but in front of an ordinary person, especially a man who likes her, she can be quite convincing, when she smooths her rough edges over and smiles brightly and pretends she isn't who she is, and that she can't do what she's done, and that she doesn't come from where she comes from. _That_ is the Allison that Raymond knows, the Allison from 1963, who cuts hair at Odessa's, and lost her voice in an accident, and had driven down to Dallas from somewhere up north, and doesn't want to talk about it.

The thing is, he likes her, without knowing a thing about her. He likes her _because_ he doesn't know a thing about her.

The thing is, Allison has this tendency, when she's alone in a strange city, to latch herself onto a kind, loving man, and to make herself over into a version of herself he might find agreeable, and to wrap him around her finger, without returning the favor. She'd been in Los Angeles, with a string of stars, until she'd selected Patrick for his wholesomeness, which complimented her own. And now she is in Dallas, and she is circling that same eventuality with Raymond, and she knows that the lack of trust she will afford him, and that he will afford her will ultimately reveal that the shape of their arc is spiraling right down the drain.

The thing is, that has to stop. She isn't that person anymore. 

`The thing is, ` she tells him, after she tugs her fingers loose, `I’m waiting for someone. And I like you very much, but we are going to remain friends. And if that is going to be a problem, you need to tell me now.`

He reads her words carefully. He’s a teacher, she thinks, but she can’t recall where. She'll have to ask him later.

And then he looks up at her, and she watches the warmth in his dark eyes as he nods his head, and they carry on.

They become a bit of a pair, and Allison thinks a lot about how she’s fallen so fast into her old place, spinning up plans at the side of a strong leader, and rallying their group into line.

 _Some things stay,_ Luther had said once, and he’s right, and she finds the thought deeply comforting, that she is changing so much here, but she’s still ultimately _herself._

Then comes the sit-in.

It’s something she and Ray have conceptualized together, that they’ve debated furiously, he with words, she with a pen until her hand seized up. They’ve read about the ones down in Greensboro a few years back, and are preparing to follow suit. Allison in particular has pushed for this, the tenth, to be the day they go about it. 

`The President will be in town in twelve days,` she’d explained at the meeting, `and if this goes right, we could attract national media attention by the time he’s here.`

“We stand a chance at having someone _meet_ with him,” Ray had insisted, and Allison bit her tongue. He’s been so _excited_ about the idea, and she wants to tell him that it won’t really matter soon enough, but she keeps thinking better of it. She wouldn’t be able to explain how she knows what she knows, not in a way that raises even more questions. 

Allison has been in Dallas for twenty-five days, when she files in, takes her seat among the protesters, and steels herself. 

Her relationship to time has changed completely in the past month, but this is the first time she’s really _felt_ how quickly it can turn, from a slow syrupy crawl to a rush of white water. She is sitting for hours that feel like decades, and her eardrums are aching from the screaming, and there’s sugar being poured down the back of her dress collar, and then suddenly, everything happens so _fast._

To put it simply, things escalate, flashing in front of her so fast she can hardly think at all.

The red-hot scald of coffee searing into her lap. A rough hand smashing her face into the smeary counter. Ray, suddenly ripped from the line next to her. A line of hands all raised. Screaming, all around her the screaming, so many voices so tangled in each others’ noise that all the words are mashed together. Bodies packed in, bodies that press her out of the lunch counter and into the cool night air.

And Ray, dragged backwards through the surging crowd, through the tear gas clouding at their feet.

Allison follows, ripping from grasping arms and racing after him, knowing she can’t leave him alone. 

He’s out of sight just for a second, and then there he is, in the middle of the street, with a police baton bearing down on him. 

She knows that he isn’t going to stop.

Unless.

It’s been a month, and Allison’s wound has closed up completely. It doesn’t even hurt anymore; in the beginning, the ache had been a constant pulse of pain, but now it only prickles when she speaks above a whisper. Allison can’t scream at all. She can’t beg, without her voice tearing out of her in a rough growl, without her throat burning like she’d swallowed a hot poker. She can whisper well enough, but she isn’t _sure_ if her power’s even back yet, if it’ll even work…

She has to try. She _has_ to.

So Allison catches the officer by the arm, tightening her fingers around his baton as she wrenches his arm back. She folds her head over the back of his shoulder, leans into his ear, and hisses, “I heard a--”

No, no, that’s not right. She’s speaking too softly for the echo to take effect. He can barely understand her, and if he can barely understand her, it won't matter at all, if her rumor is back or not.

He’s turning towards her.

It might blow up in her face. It might not work at all. It might lead to something far worse than she’d intended. But she has to try again.

Allison swallows thickly, bracing herself for the burning, and then gathers her voice from deep in her lungs, pushing it up and out and towards him.

**“I heard a rumor that you walked away.”**

The man’s eyes turn to milky glass.

The baton slips from his fingers.

And he walks away.

Allison brings her hand up to her throat. It’s burning, pricking tears from her eyes, and she’s coughing, wetly. 

It’s back.

It’s _back,_ and she’s used it long before she probably should have. Something in her might’ve ruptured, and her act may well have set the clock on her recovery back weeks. 

She stares down at Ray, watching him clamber to his feet, wide-eyed and blinking slowly, and for the first time, Allison knows with absolute certainty that she won't regret it at all.

* * *

On the first hour of the twenty-ninth of October, 1963, Diego Hargreeves lands lithely on his toes, crouching in an alleyway in Dallas, Texas.

He lands alone.

Diego peers around expectantly at first, then wildly, a sonic blast of panic blaring in his brain. There is no one in the alley with him, nothing but an old dumpster and a scattering of trash, and his family is gone.

And immediately, his head feels like it’s imploding from within.

Diego, never one to give in to a terrible ache, especially not on the streets at night, grits his teeth and rises to his feet, forcing them to move, one in front of the other, as he wanders onto the street, pausing to empty his stomach into a trash can and then sheepishly fasten the lid back on to conceal what he’d left in it, and then carrying on.

He’s patrolling the streets of… oh _fuck him,_ he’s in the South in the _sixties,_ isn’t he?

_Five, you’d better be dead, because if you’re not, when I get my hands on you..._

Right. Yes. He’s patrolling the streets, a set of streets he’s never seen or set foot on in his life, and he is searching for any sign of his family. A scrap of fabric torn from Luther’s turtleneck, a strand of Allison’s wiry hair, a footprint made by a Super Star Lanes branded bowling shoe, a drop of blood from Vanya’s ear, _anything._

He doesn’t find it.

He searches until the sun comes up, and he doesn’t find a single thing.

And then, the sun’s in his eyes, and the pounding pain’s cleaving his mind in half, leaving it open to the stinging wind, and that puts an end to Diego’s search for his family. 

Diego’s used to enduring pain, and to spending long nights on his feet with a concussion throbbing in his head, or a wound in his side that’s only sort-of patched up. But he’s never felt anything quite as intense as this before, has never been betrayed by his body so thoroughly. 

It’s very, very easy to blame the headache. So he does. It’s the headache, you see, that makes him scream at the television salesman who stops to ask him about why he’s loitering in front of his store, staring at the image of Kennedy onscreen with such a stricken look. It’s not stress, it’s not terror, it’s not the creeping sense of dread that being trapped in the segregated South is instilling in him every minute he’s walking down the street. It’s definitely not the uniquely existential nature of staring at a man who you know for a fact will be dead in a month, whose death will change the world.

It’s the headache. And that is final.

Diego spends a grand total of eight hours on the streets of Dallas, before he’s strongarmed into a van and carted off to the Shineyview Hospital for the Mentally Ill.

He isn’t totally sure what it is that does him in: the outburst itself, the audacity to be in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, the very prominent knife harness he has strapped to his chest, or some combination of all of it.

But nonetheless, he is here, sitting in a pair of white pajamas, surrounded by crazies, his scruff getting more and more ragged by the day, because the orderlies won’t let him have a blade. 

At first, he’d been content to lay low. 

To sit in the crowded admissions ward, among the other lunatics of questionable insanity, crossing his arms with a carefully-honed mask of disinterest over his face. He’d been using the daily outbursts and the flurry of orderly attention they tended to attract to carefully catalog each of the entrances, to file them away in his mind for future use. 

Or else, to endure the newly-established group therapy sessions, offering grunts and one-word answers whenever the exhaustingly cheery orderly prompts him to speak, to admit his infatuation with his hero complex, to let go of his paranoid delusions about the world going up in flames and the president’s assassination.

Ordinarily, Diego would let those slights crawl beneath his skin and fester there. He’d whip out his words and start slicing into everyone around him.

But this is different. He’s _not_ staying here, and the less attention he can draw to himself in the time it’ll take to plan his escape, the better.

Lila Pitts, it seems, is going to be an obstacle to that.

She’s a fellow new admission to the hospital, thin and wiry with smooth brown skin, choppy black hair, and a dark sort of glamour to her that Diego can’t quite put his finger on, but nonetheless finds uniquely intriguing, that keeps drawing him to catch quick glimpses of her from the corner of his eye. She’d gotten here only a scant few hours after he’d come down from his sedation and been deemed stable enough to release from his room, and from the moment he'd seen her, he knew he'd never forget the feline way she took in the room. 

By some horrible stroke of fate she had directed her attentions like a laser right at him, and promptly stuck to his side like glue, citing the importance of new fish sticking together in strange ponds, or some other colloquialism he’d found charming enough, if a little odd.

To his initial annoyance, she had refused to accept his cold shoulder. Instead, Lila seemed to take it as encouragement. She’d perch with terrible posture at his side and chew his ear off with a London accent so pronounced that he’d find it impossible to believe she’d been transferred from some hospital in Louisiana, had it not been for the orderlies confirming it to one another repeatedly, being similarly skeptical themselves.

It’s not that he outright dislikes her. If anything, he finds her rather black sense of wit to be a bit of a comfort, given its odd familiarity, and her alert demeanor is a welcome break from the shuffling denizens of the asylum.

It’s that he doesn’t intend to stay here, and that if he plans to escape, he’ll be doing it alone. So he hardens himself to her presence, and resolves to take as little interest in her as possible.

That is, until she mentions to him how she’d been admitted.

“My mother died,” she explains one day, splaying her hands out in front of her to watch the way the ugly fluorescents catch the bright green of her fingernail polish and make it glitter, “And I guess I went a little crazy.”

She’s smiling at him as she says the words, her eyes dark and alert and fishing for something in him, but there’s a quiver in her voice, one he knows is pointing to a clear vulnerability within her that, if he were to so much as rest a fingertip on it, might send her to pieces.

He’s seen it, and he hates himself for seeing it, for immediately thinking to look for it at all, for filing it away for some hypothetical future use. 

_It would be cruel,_ he thinks, and wonders why _now_ of all times, he’s worrying so much about being cruel.

 _Maybe it’s the apocalypse,_ he supposes. _Maybe a lot of things are different now, and I’m just now catching up to it._

“Mine too,” he says honestly, and her hand crawls up his shoulder like a green-toed spider, and squeezes it reassuringly, and past that moment, he can only think of her warmly, in spite of himself. 

He doesn’t glare when she sidles up to him like a stray cat in the rec yard, or when she crouches in the chair next to him, twitching with wiry energy on the night the powers-that-be decide that a showing of _Casablanca_ will be beneficial to their wards’ health, or when she's chatting about the movie for days on end after they've seen it. He doesn’t encourage her, save one conversation that he can’t stop himself from starting.

It’s the one where he asks her about how it is that she’d come from Louisiana, and yet had a crisp British accent, to which she’d replied, impishly: “My mother--"

On again, about her mother. Honestly, it's like she hung the moon.

"-- did a lot of traveling for her work, she’s really a _trailblazer,_ you know. _So_ glamorous. So focused on the job that she’d never stopped to marry or have any children of her own. But she’d spotted me during her travels, and wanted me so badly she’d just _had_ to have me.”

"Oh, so you were adopted."

"What? Is that strange?" Lila stiffens, "Is that not a thing here?"

"No. Not at all. I was too, you know." _Adopted,_ of course, in Diego's mind defined as _bought for an undisclosed sum of money._

"Really?"

"Yeah. It sucks."

"Well," Lila tuts sympathetically, "Isn't that a shame. You know, I'm _so_ happy that my mother found me? I had such a _special_ life with her, you know, she was my best friend in the whole world. It makes me wonder what my birth parents would've thought, if they could only see how _extraordinary_ it all was." 

“Didn't feel like stopping by their place after the funeral?” 

It’s intended as a joke, but she either doesn’t pick up on it, or chooses not to.

“Oh no,” she replies bluntly, winding an unwashed strand of black hair around her fingertip, “They're dead. Robbery gone wrong. Horrific thing. It’s half of why I’m here, you know.”

“Oh,” Diego replies, wincing at how his first true conversation with his odd sort-of-friend had led to such a grisly topic. Whoops.

He leaves it at that, and pulls the veil of indifference down between them again, to cover for the way his ears had turned hot and red.

And he can tell that he’d struck a nerve, because she lets him, drawing her legs up to squeeze them to her chest, and burying her face in her knees until it’s time to head back to their rooms.

They never get to have another conversation, because Diego catches the ire of an orderly, around two weeks into his involuntary stay, or is it three, or four or… or… he can’t _tell_ how many days it’s been, and the thought is a knife of terror that embeds itself in his spine. 

It’s stuck in him, as he drifts in and out of consciousness, mummified in a straitjacket in a room with walls that, despite their padding, are anything but soft. The fear, that he is well and truly losing it, that time is slipping like sand between his fingers and there’s nothing he can do but watch it fall to the floor, sticks to him, whispering over images of his family, which are running in his head like an overexposed strip of film.

Doubt had crept into him weeks ago, and it had stuck within him, growing and festering like a malignant mold. 

_They’re dead,_ he keeps catching himself thinking over and over, and he’s thinking it now, strangled by his straitjacket and dizzy from the drug he’s been given for getting a little snappish at an orderly who’d been breathing down his neck this morning. _They’ve all died. They burned alive in the apocalypse, and I’m the only one left. It’s just me now, and I’m trapped here, and I’m alone, and the world’s going to end, and..._

And he’s going crazy in here. 

If he stays here a minute longer, he’ll turn into the rest of them, and that can’t happen.

Fuck a plan, he needs to get _out_ of here.

With the urgency of the most desperate of animals caught in hunters’ trap, the ones who’ve resolved to gnaw their own legs off to escape it, Diego sets to work twisting his way out of the straitjacket. 

He’s been in one before, has escaped one before, knows the straps and their fastenings well enough to do it backwards, blindfolded and yes, even coasting down from a high of paraldehyde.

He decides not to think too hard about how he’d learned both of those things; to keep as clear a head as possible while sedated, and to escape such a particular kind of binding. He may not be as over his father as he’d thought he was a few weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean he’ll give the old man an inch of credit.

Wiggling loose of this jacket and picking his way out of the padded cell? That’s all him, thank you _very_ much.

Diego calls upon his mental map of the hospital as he treks urgently through the hall, making for the rooms where they store the inmates’ personal effects. He needs his knives, and his gloves and the rabbit’s foot chain wrapped up in his sweater, and--

“Hey.”

The word is whispered, but it booms down the hall with a volatile echo, one that makes Diego wince.

He turns to glare at the woman who’d spoken it, to shoot daggers with his eyes, as his knife belt is currently under lock and key.

Then he pauses, realizing that Lila too has somehow crept out of her room and made her way all the way from the women’s side of the hospital to his own. That all’s quiet in the halls, which means she’d broken out of her room, and the ward itself, without detection, and she’d gotten the drop on even him, which tells him that she knows how to stay light on her feet.

Which, admittedly, Diego finds _deeply_ impressive.

“Are you looking to leave too?” she whispers, leaning in and grinning, her eyes flashing in the orange glare of the hallway light.

He nods, feeling the corners of his lips quirking up in excitement.

Lila ducks past him to produce a pin from her sleeve, which she immediately starts working the lock with. She’d had the same plan as him, she'd thought a step _ahead_ of him. Oh, Diego _likes_ her.

She pops the door open, and brandishes a thin sinewy arm in the direction of the inmates’ effects, drawling, “Lead on.”

Her words are like music to his ears.

* * *

On the eleventh hour of the ninth of November, 1963, Klaus and Ben Hargreeves crumple into a mess of squirming limbs in an alleyway in Dallas, Texas.

They land alone.

While Ben pads off to scout the area, and then comes back as blanched as a ghost can possibly be, Klaus gets hit by the side effects. Hard. 

Thankfully, as a veteran of time travel Klaus isn’t panicked by the side effects. And as a recovering drug addict, he’s quite accustomed to weathering the effects of his body betraying him, especially in strange alleyways. So, he decides to spend the day sleeping in the alley, huddled under a pile of newspapers to ward off the sting of the sunlight, until he feels a little less like he’s going to graffiti the wall with projectile vomit. 

The next morning, he rubs the stiffness out of his muscles, present enough of mind to begin glancing around for ghosts, to see if his family are here after all, and he’d been too out of it to notice them.

They’re nowhere. Thank _God._

Ben, who is of a like mind with him, is similarly relieved, and already musing about whether they may have been scattered around the city, or the country even. 

So Klaus turns, tugging out a jagged piece of metal from under the dumpster, and carving a little message in the wall. Just in case someone stops by.

He’s then hit with a snarl from his stomach, and decides the search will go on, just _after_ he’s provided for himself.

He tugs out the wad of money he’d picked from the wallets on the street of the Icarus when he’d been stuck on lookout duty, pats himself on the back for his foresight, and treats himself to a late breakfast at a lunch counter that, to his deep discomfort, he learns is segregated.

So, well. Guess that solves that on when and where the hell they are, gee _thanks_ Ben for telling him.

“I _did_ tell you, actually, Klaus. It’s not my fault you were sleeping.”

“You could’ve woken me. It was important, wasn’t it?”

“Klaus, you rolled over and went right back to it.”

Klaus quirks his lip. “Yeah, I did learn to tune you out pretty well, huh?”

“Not funny.”

Klaus settles into a booth with an excellent view of the doors, and, as is their custom whenever Klaus is sober enough to interact with him, Ben chooses one item off the menu for Klaus to eat, which he then supplies an animated and highly detailed review of, so his dear departed brother may live vicariously through him. 

He is then asked to leave by the proprietor of the diner, for disturbing his customers. Which, ouch. But fine, _whatever._ Those eggs were shit anyway. All runny and deeply unsatisfying. A waste of fifteen cents.

Klaus should probably be a little more worried about being homeless, or being trapped in the 1960s with nothing but a pair of tight leather pants to his name. But weirdly, he’s pretty blase about the whole thing. 

It’s a couple things: He’s been homeless before, and at this point, he kind of gets how it works. And what’s more, after the week he’s had, he’s _alive._ And if his family isn’t, they haven’t found him yet, so he has plausible deniability, which he clings to firmly.

But really, the idea is, if he acts like nothing can hurt him, then nothing will. It’ll just bounce right off of him, like he’s made of rubber. 

So he spends the afternoon bouncing. He and Ben wander the streets, stopping to stare at the sights, to pass into a shop here or there, determined to spend his spoils and fill their time with something that might distract them from the increasingly upsetting problem of What The Fuck We’re Going To Do Now. He gets a nice pair of red sunglasses that'll help with the eyestrain, a fresh pair of white cowboy boots that don’t pinch his toes the way the bowling shoes do, and gets a dirty look from the man behind the counter when he's close enough to see the smears of eyeliner on Klaus's face (and oh, _right,_ they're in the sixties, and the sixties are a bad time to be a person quite like them).

“We could take a road trip,” says Ben, when they’re sitting out near the highway, watching the buglike cars zip by. “That might be fun. Hypothetically, of course. We’d need a car, though. And you’d need to learn how to drive.”

“Hey,” Klaus says, “What if we hitched out West?”

“West? Like, California or something?”

“Yeah. You wanted to go to the ocean, right?”

Ben smiles, sticking his hands deep in his pockets, and peering around sheepishly.

“We can’t.”

“Really? Why not?”

“They might be _here,_ you know. Maybe they’re all wandering around, looking for us.” 

“Hey, didn’t you just say they could be anywhere?”

“I mean. I did. But I think we should cross out the city we’re in as a possibility before we leave it behind.”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

They waste another hour, chatting with a group of hippies, to whom Klaus imparts news of the apocalypse. 

“What?” he asks a flabbergasted Ben, when they’re checking out Trinity River.

“You can’t just run around telling _everyone_ that shit.”

“Why not? What’s the harm? The people ought to know.”

“Because you could screw things up. We’re not supposed to _be_ here, you know. Who _knows_ what you just did to the future.”

“By telling three flower children that the moon’s going to hit the earth in sixty years?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“You are _such_ a buzzkill. Next I know, you’re gonna hate that I’m starting a cult.”

“You can’t be serious.” 

“Oh, I _absolutely_ am,” Klaus says, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

Ben’s taken the bait. “What would we _do_ with a cult?”

Really, it's a little bit funny how gullible he can be sometimes.

“What _wouldn’t_ we do with a cult? Think about it: Sex, money, power...”

“No drugs, I’m hoping.”

“God, are you really still on about that?”

“It’s been four days, Klaus.”

“I _told_ you, I’m turning a new leaf.” 

“You say that a lot. Forgive me for being a little skeptical.”

Klaus sighs. “Well, _this_ time, it’s true. _This time,_ I have something to look forward to.”

Ben decides to hold his tongue. There are a few potential _somethings_ Klaus could be referring to, and he’s self-aware enough to know he won’t respond well to one _something_ in particular.

Best to cross that bridge when they get to it. 

They walk.

They walk until Klaus’s feet go numb in their brand-new boots, which at least he can say he’s broken in quite well.

They walk until the sun rolls below the buildings, and Ben stops.

Ahead of them, there’s a buzzing cloud of urgent noise. They’ve circled all the way back to the street on which they’d stumbled, and there’s a crowd gathered outside the lunch counter he’d gone to this morning, a smattering of police cars blaring so loud neither of them can hear themselves think. 

“Hey,” Klaus squints, tipping his sunglasses up onto the crown of his head. “What’s going on? Can you see anything?” 

“Do you think there was an accident? Do you see a car wreck?”

Soon, they’re close enough to recognize the shapes of signs being waved overhead, to make out rifts in the crowd delineating factions.

It’s a protest, they realize. And, given what they’d just seen that morning, and who's crying out in front of the restaurant, it takes exactly a second to guess what it’s a protest of. 

“Oh shit,” Ben hisses. “What do we do? Do we help?”

“Help _who?_ Or do we just stay out of it?”

 _“Stay out of it,_ are you kidding me?”

“I mean, it’s a thought, isn't it? We don't know--”

For a second, the crowd parts, and in the midst of a sea of swarming, frantic bodies, they see the sharp shape of a lithe woman, the shape of…

Allison.

It’s _Allison,_ tangled among the protesters and reaching out towards a man who’d been knocked to the ground.

He sees her for a second, and somehow that second lasts a decade, rooting him to the street and knocking the breath from his lungs.

Somehow, in that second, he drinks in the sight of her, committing every detail to memory. The curve of her arm, the swish of her straightened hair over her shoulder, the flash of orange as her skirt swings, the way her face-- _that is Allison's face,_ he thinks dumbly, _I am looking at_ _Allison's face--_ twists in worry.

 _Turn your head just a bit to the left,_ he thinks. _Turn around and look and see me. I'm right here._

Then, a plume of blue smoke floats in between them.

By the time it clears, she’s gone.

* * *

On the ninth hour of the fourteenth of November, 1963, Luther Hargreeves lands on his back, crunching into the flat top of a dumpster in an alleyway in Dallas, Texas.

He lands alone.

The wind’s been knocked from his lungs by his landing, and he lays there for a minute, then two, then three, staring at the soft, wispy edges of the clouds in the midday sky, his thoughts spinning above his head, just out of reach. 

He only manages to grasp onto one: _I was holding Vanya._

But now his arms are empty.

He stares at them, blinking slowly, like he’s going to close his eyes, and then open them, and find his sister unconscious in his arms, and his family scattered in the alleyway around him, groaning and complaining.

But there’s no one.

Luther rolls off the dumpster, and onto the pavement, and is hit with a wave of nausea so intense, that only the years of training that had prepared him for space travel are enough to keep him from passing out entirely, or keeping his dinner down. 

The red brick dust from the mansion that’s coating his legs smears across the ground, and he can’t pull himself to his feet, his weight dragging him back down before he can find his balance. He’s so exhausted, he doesn’t even know what he’d do if he were to even stand, he’d just… _he’d just..._

The world pitches in Luther’s vision, and swims for a moment. He blinks quickly, to keep himself from falling back into a deep, intense sleep.

Luther swallows, waiting for his teeth to stop feeling like they’re going to rattle out of their sockets. 

Then, he starts screaming.

_“Allison?! Ben?! Five?! Vanya?! Klaus?! Diego?!”_

He runs through the line again, and again, and again, until his voice gives out hours later.

But still, there’s no one.

And then he sits, staring around helplessly, suddenly a small child lost in a strange place, feeling his enlargened heart thumping frantically at the inside of his ribcage, faster, faster, _faster._

He thinks: _What happened? Where’d they go? Are they dead, are they okay? Did they land in some other place? Some other time? There has to be some sort of reason as to why I’ve landed here, of all places._

Luther crawls to a nest of newspaper gathered just behind the dumpster, and collapses into it with a grunt.

He can’t do anything if he’s reeling from the journey, he decides. Best to sleep this off, and try again in the morning. Best to stay put, in case they’ll be along in a moment, or in case they’ve already come, so they might be able to find him.

 _Assuming they’re not dead,_ a terrible voice says in his head, _Assuming they’re not all torn to shreds somewhere outside of time, and you’re the only one left, and you’re alone, you’ll be alone forever, and it's your fault for not holding on tight enough..._

Luther shifts uncomfortably on the asphalt, turning his head towards the wall.

And freezes.

There’s a message, carved sideways into the wall. Exactly at the angle someone who’d been sleeping here would be able to read.

`Ouch!`

`-- K. H. #00.04.`

Luther draws in a sharp gasp at the sight of it, reaching out to touch the words written by his brother, who is _alive,_ who is _here,_ who’d just _been_ here, who might be back by morning.

The alley fills with the sound of his laughter, warm and relieved, as he settles in to wait for his family to come back to him. Luther, who spent years in a steel box in space, anticipating the transmission that would allow him to come home, and many more alone on earth, staring at a row of vacant bedrooms, hoping they might be filled once day, knows a lot about waiting. He knows he can do it.

* * *

On the fourteenth hour of the fifteenth of November, 1963, Vanya Hargreeves lands on her hands and knees in a whirl of orange and brown leaves in an alleyway in Dallas, Texas.

She lands alone.

Vanya’s thoughts are as scattered as the leaves winding around her. She cannot recall how she got here, only six faces scattered above her like floating lanterns, a tunnel of blue-white, a shivering electrical chill that had crawled into her limbs and jerked her awake, and then jerked her away. 

She remembers what came before that: a bright light and a terrible song and thunder cracking in her ear, the loudest sound she’s ever heard, the _last_ sound she’s heard in her ear at all, since she’s landed, save the smooth, crystalline ringing that’d faded into a heavy, pulsing silence, a silence that makes her skull throb, a silence she plants a pale hand onto the side of her head, over her ear, to try and contain.

Her hand comes away wet and shockingly red, and Vanya makes a fretful little noise, pressing her palm even tighter over her ear. 

Vanya wobbles to her feet, and begins to wander, lambent and drowsy, out of the alleyway. She never stops to peer at the bullet scars marring its walls, or finds the little message written on its side near the ground. She is so lost in herself that such details, if she had noticed them at all, do not matter at all to her.

There’s a soft waving in her head, like water lapping a shoreline. Her stomach is clenching urgently, and her skin feels ready to tear itself off her back and go slinking off back into the shadows from which she’d come. For the life of her, it's so hard to keep her balance now, and she doesn't understand why.

She stumbles out of the alley, and into the road.

The terrible sound comes flying at her like an evil spirit: the high, horrid scream of rubber against pavement, as the car plowing straight at her struggles to brake in time.

Vanya acts on impulse, flexing a long-forgotten muscle, catching the scream of the tires, and building a wall out of it, a hammer of raw power flying out in all directions, to send the car skidding backwards across the road away from her, to send _everything_ within the reach of her power roaring away from her at the speed of sound.

It happens in a split second, yet somehow, at the heart of it all, Vanya sees _everything._

There’s a swirl of dust and debris that whips up and around her, as if she were the center of a cyclone at the moment of its birth, and then a bubble of air that pops all at once, shattering brick and glass and metal, twisting telephone poles in two and sending wires lashing down, bearing bright trails of sparks. 

And then, she is alone, in the center of a blast… no, _half_ a blast, that’s scoured the street ahead of her in a wide arc, deep enough to burst the pipes beneath it. Showers of water are arcing up into the late afternoon air, soaking the street, soaking Vanya’s soiling suit and sticking her silver hair to her neck.

Vanya takes a handful of her hair into her free hand, staring at it, her mouth opening and closing over and over like a faulty automaton’s. 

The lights of the marquee on the movie theater across from her sputter out, all at once, when she turns towards it. They flicker out much in the same way that a songbird goes quiet at the sight of a hawk, disappearing into silence to shield itself. 

It doesn’t make any sense to Vanya. _Why would it do that?_ she wonders, still feeling her thoughts sifting like sand through her head, and since she seems to have been dropped into a different city, into a different time, a part of her thinks that perhaps she may well be dropped into world in which buildings live and breathe and think. _What did it think I was going to do?_

She stares up at the name, written in sputtering lights above the glass doors, and she blinks in confusion, expecting Icarus, expecting the boy who'd flown into the sun. She doesn’t remember a _movie_ theater, she doesn’t… oh God, where's her _violin,_ where is _is_ she, how did she _get_ here?

There are people, running in through the chalky gray clouds of dust to start running their hands through the rubble, and it is their quick movements that stir Vanya from her stasis, into the shock of memory, that takes the scattered images and orders them all at once.

She remembers, yes, she remembers _everything._

She is being hunted.

She is being _hunted,_ and the wolves on her heels will have seen her outburst. They will be upon her soon, and she has to keep moving, has to run and hide in the hopes that doing so will deter them from her scent. And if they find her... _if they find her..._

Vanya turns, and starts to run.

* * *

Klaus had _seen_ Allison, he’d been sure of it, and he’d confided as much in Ben. And, like a hungry dog chases a bone, they’d stubbornly gone sniffing their way through South Dallas, taking it one street at a time.

It takes them five days, in all. Five long, continuous days of pressing noses to windows, rapping on doors and asking, as unsuspiciously as possible, “Would you happen to know a woman by the name of Allison Hargreeves, with a tattoo like this, and a scar across her throat, who might live here, maybe?”

It’s a little touch-and-go, at first, because of the cops crawling the streets, sent there no doubt to send a message after everything that’d gone down at Stadtler’s the night he and Ben start looking, but Klaus, being white, and Ben, being dead, don’t experience much question from them.

However, Klaus, being very, very out of place for a variety of reasons, the chief of them being his race, doesn’t exactly get the welcome wagon tugged out for him when he goes knocking on doors, asking about the location of someone he claims to be his sister. 

But they make do, and the next morning, they fare a little better, when the shops open and people stream into the streets again. 

And they keep at it. Ben’s constantly zipping in and out of walls, groaning and shaking his head in disappointment, while Klaus feels his energy seeping out of him as though he’s a battery on his last legs. He’s slept only a few scattered hours, his eyes feel as heavy as bowling balls, and his mind’s stuffed with marshmallow fluff. 

_At least the weather’s nice,_ he muses. It’s a breezy, sunny day. Cool, but not cold. God bless Texas.

It’s Klaus’s fatigue, more than anything, that reveals Allison to them. 

He’s pausing to take a breath, to lean against the glass window of a certain South Dallas beauty parlor and contemplate his life choices, when he pauses.

And leans in closer, for a better look, when he sees a familiar silhouette drag a hair-heavy broom over to a trash can, perk her head up at an unheard cry, and reach out to hold a comb for a woman nearby.

It’s Allison. He can tell in the way that people who’ve known each other for years, who’ve long since memorized the lines of one another’s bodies and the weight of one another’s presences can tell one another apart from a crowd, even from a distance, even without so much as seeing each other’s faces.

When the lavender sleeve of her sweater rides up, and he sees the flash of tattoo on her forearm, it only confirms it.

Allison doesn’t see him at first. She’s too busy caught up in her own thoughts.

Everyone’s been a little cross with her in the past few days, and she isn’t certain if it’s that she’s worn out her welcome, that she’d set someone’s hair wrong without realizing it again, or if they blame her in particular for the sit-in turning out as it did. It was very much her project, after all; though it’s her and Ray’s idea, she’d been the one to announce it, and to lead the charge in preparing the protesters, and to choose the location, so the scrutiny has fallen to her for its failure. Whatever it is, she’s very, _very_ aware of the chill coating their collective demeanor when she walks into a room.

 _Did they see me,_ she worries. _Did they see what I did? Did Ray? Did he tell them?_

Allison reaches up, running her fingers gently along her scar, and gritting her teeth at the flare of pain that flickers at her touch. The pain’s back, washing over her in waves that have made it impossible to eat anything in the past few days without feeling like a vice grip has its hand around her throat as she tries to swallow. She’s ruptured something, she thinks. 

_Which, shit. So much for getting it back by Christmas._

The rumble of conversation shifts pitch, as a whisper hisses its way through the women, something about a weird-looking white man lingering outside, _a cop or detective maybe... we should expect to get some of those poking around in the next couple of weeks, especially given that the President’s coming… he’s not leaving, why isn’t he leaving… what’s he looking for… should someone get the broom?_

Allison peers up. 

It’s… Klaus?

He slaps a palm to the glass, and draws his free finger up to point at it.

_Hello._

Klaus has seen a lot of wonderful things in his life. The Eiffel Tower nearly taking off into the air, dawn breaking over the Mountain of the Crouching Beast and painting the mist champagne-gold, a train rat eating a slice of pizza with both hands, the way Ben’s eyes crinkle up when he laughs, his whole family hand in hand with lightning dancing across their arms.

None of it compares to the way Allison’s eyes bulge as she realizes who’s in front of her, her bright red lips popping open as she mouths his name slowly, hesitantly, like she’s in a waking dream.

He nods, mouthing: _surprise!_

Allison throws the hot comb she’d been tasked with holding and drops her broom, springing out of the parlor so fast she nearly leaves her heels where they’re standing. She throws her arms around Klaus, nearly knocking him to the street, but he catches her around the waist, and swings her around to sway with the momentum she carries. Ben stretches his arms around them both, a gesture that none will feel but him, but is no less important.

On their sixth day in Dallas, and on Allison’s thirtieth, they’ve found each other.

Allison doesn’t think twice about walking out on her job. She feels ten years younger, full of bounding youthful energy. Her mood is contagious, and Klaus has a spring in his step as she loops her arm through his and eagerly takes them to where she’s been staying for the past month, to the room she’s been renting in a house that she is thrilled to find still-empty for the day.

There, Klaus kicks off his boots at the door, slouches on the sofa and chews on a sandwich Allison gives him free reign to make in the kitchen, while she digs through her things for a notebook she can use to speak to him.

At last, she emerges, brandishing: `How did you find me?`

“Dumb luck?” He glances at Ben, who nods. “Dumb luck, mostly. Thought we saw you a couple days ago? Out in front of Staedtler’s? You know, the restaurant?”

Allison straightens.

“That _was_ you?”

She nods. 

He takes her in again, taking note of the dark circles under her eyes, the particular way she’s holding herself that Klaus knows from years of experience is the way Allison stands when she’s had a rough time during a mission.

“Well, are you okay?”

Allison sighs. She taps her pen on her paper for a moment, considering her response.

`Tired.`

He extends a narrow arm, to tug her down to sit next to him. She slides down on the cushion, nestling her head into his shoulder, and exposing the puckered pink line across her throat to a shaft of sunlight that lances through Odessa’s curtains and illuminates it like a spotlight.

 _Oh,_ Klaus remembers.

“Does it hurt?” He reaches for it, and Allison catches his hand, guiding it away.

Allison shrugs.

“Can you talk yet?”

“Clearly not,” chirps Ben, perched on the arm of the sofa, “I mean, the notepad?”

Klaus rolls his eyes at him.

Allison reaches up to run the pad of her thumb across the scar, and then takes Klaus by the shoulder, pulling him in to hiss in his ear, _“Like this.”_

He pulls back.

“Can you…” he flashes his fingers around her mouth, and she smiles indulgently, understanding the gesture.

She nods, grating out, “Yes--”

Then stops, wincing.

Klaus flinches at the roughness of her tone, like she’d swallowed serrated gravel. “Okay, that’s progress, right? I mean, imagine how _awful_ it’d be to not do it at _all_ anymore!”

Allison presses her lips into a line, and glances away. 

She switches to her notepad.` Rumor back. Used first time last night. Hurts to use it. Think I tore something.`

“Oh. Well… ouch?”

Ben chooses then to pipe up: “She should learn to sign. Wait, is that a thing yet?”

“I don’t actually know,” Klaus admits. “God, this time thing’s fucking with me.”

“We’ll go to the library later then. See if we can find anything.”

“Sure. I mean, we’ve got time.”

Allison is staring at them, mouthing: _Ben?_

“Yeah, he’s...” Klaus says, a rush of determination coursing through him, as he tugs away from Allison, to ball his hands into fists and grit his teeth. “Here, how did I…” 

He thinks back, to four nights ago. To how Ben’d winked into the world of the living, able to touch and be touched, blue and bright. To how he’d been the source of that apparition, how he’d somehow sent a cosmic lasso out into the dark and anchored himself to…

And that’s it. He’d been an _anchor._

Klaus draws in a sharp breath through his nose, and casts his power out of him like a net, grasping for ghosts, for one ghost in particular, who isn’t even lost somewhere in the great beyond, but is feet away from him, willing and wanting and reaching back to him.

And he begins reeling him in, back from the light, back towards the physical, rooting Ben to himself. Pale light begins to glisten from the cracks between his fingers, and he feels heavier somehow, like he’s carrying an invisible weight on his shoulders.

Ben, as Klaus sees him, begins to glow blue around the edges. 

Ben, as Allison sees him… Well, she _sees_ him.

Allison stares, wide-eyed, as Ben, blue and blurred at the edges, but nonetheless _here,_ flickers into being, perched on the edge of her sofa like a bird of prey. He’s exactly as she’d last seen him, his hair in the slicked-back undercut he’d always been so serious about getting just right, forever seventeen.

Ben never smiled quite like _this_ though, or at least, he’d never smiled with such soft, warm fondness at _her._

Allison reaches out, slowly, tentatively, like a sudden movement might make him vanish, and he reaches out towards her.

Her hand is in his, and it is warm and soft and he is touching, he can _touch,_ and it isn’t enough, so he tugs her forwards sharply, tightening an arm around her middle and burying his face in her shoulder so he can feel as much of her as he can. 

_“Hi,”_ she breathes in his ear, and the heat of her breath on his neck is the first warm thing he’s felt in twelve years. 

And then the warm weight of Klaus is pressing down on her back, his arms snaking around to grab at Ben and tangle them all together, and all of them are crying, the weight of all their reunions combined at last crashing down on them.

“I missed you,” Allison croaks, and grimaces as the invisible fist returns to its place around her throat.

“I missed you too. _So_ much.”

“Hey, come on, it’s not like you were gone-gone,” Klaus says.

“Yeah, I was off babysitting _you_ for twelve years.”

Allison wrestles her pen and paper out from behind Ben, so she can write: ?

“Really.”

 _Well that explains… a lot, actually,_ Allison thinks.

She hugs him again, nuzzling his neck with her forehead.

“Oh,” Ben says, pulling back to look her up and down, twisting his eyebrows quizzically at the sight of Allison’s hair. “I like the beehive. It’s very… _you.”_

Allison quirks her lip. `Compliment?`

“You can take it as one.”

Allison’s face brightens, and her shoulders quiver as soft huffs of breath giggle out of her. She’s laughing, as well as she can.

Then, she balls her hand into a fist, and bounces it off of Ben’s chest.

“She took it as both, I’m guessing,” proposes Klaus.

 _I did,_ mouths Allison, exaggerating her ire teasingly.

“How long’ve you even been here?” Ben asks.

`~1 month.`

Klaus whistles. “We’ve been stuck here, what, a week?”

“Six days, and it’s been _enough._ We landed in this alleyway--”

`Movie theater?`

“That’s the one. We landed across from it,” says Klaus, “Hey, do you think this means the others are around the city somewhere too? That we all just scattered?”

“How far apart do you think they are, if that’s true?” wonders Ben. “Are we the first ones to land here, or the last? Are we going to have to wait days? Weeks? Years?”

The three of them mutually grimace at the latter option. 

`Time travel sucks. Very confusing.`

“Yeah, we’re lucky this isn’t our first rodeo,” says Klaus.

Allison frowns. Flips back a page and points to the ever-useful: `?`

“Oh,” Klaus realizes. “You don’t know, do you? None of you do, except maybe Diego?”

“You were kind of vague with him.”

“You know, I was. Well, cat’s out of the bag, I guess. Ben and I got stuck in Vietnam for ten months.”

`?`

Klaus settles in, and tells her. 

Allison absorbs the information, that apparently Klaus had been kidnapped and tortured by the hitmen who’d invaded the family mansion during that uniquely hellish week they’d spent together after their father’s funeral, that apparently they’d been time-travelers, and apparently he’d pressed the wrong button on their time machine doohickey and had landed in the depths of the Vietnam War.

She absorbs it all, and tactfully replies: `That’s rough.`

“Thank you.”

`Why not just come back?`

Klaus bites his lip. “Personal reasons.”

Ben shifts on the couch.

“And I mean,” Klaus says, eager to move the conversation along, “All things considered, Vietnam’s pretty far off from Texas, but at least it’s the same basic time, just a couple of years off. I kind of have the gist of it. The gist of it being, of course, that everything basically sucks, but at least the music is great.”

Allison nods in agreement. Admittedly, she _does_ really like the music here. It’s not worth staying for, but the jingles keep catching in her head, making her tap her feet a little bit, making things at least a little more bearable.

She straightens suddenly, an idea flashing in her mind, and hops off the couch, kicking her heels off and sending them skidding across the room and tiptoeing over to the radio.

Klaus and Ben stare at each other for a moment, and spring up after her. 

They fiddle with the dial for a moment, passing the program back and forth and grumbling about how confusing it is, and then _finally,_ when they’ve gotten the damn thing to work and have a station playing something Sam Cooke, something she approves of, Allison tugs her brothers close, and pulls them into a dance. 

They’re terrible at it, a mess of limbs stumbling around a small living room as clumsily as though they were drunken teenagers, exacerbated by the fact that all three of them are stone cold sober twenty-nine-year-olds who should probably be much more coordinated than this. 

But as they’re crashing into each other, they’re cackling all the while. It’s the happiest moment any of the three of them can remember having for a very, very long time.

Naturally, it doesn’t last.

Ben is fading.

He’s gone from translucent to transparent, and she can’t hear what he’s saying anymore, like he’s calling to her from somewhere deep underwater, and in a manner of seconds after she’s realized this, he sputters out of existence.

And her weight, which had been balanced on his back, suddenly pitches forward, sending her falling straight through him.

Allison hits the floor hard, and grunts. She decides to stay there, for a minute.

Ben peers down at her.

“Hey, uh, Klaus?”

“Yeah, I read you there.” Klaus, dragging in deep breaths, runs his hand over his forehead and draws it away, making note of the smear of sweat coating it and frowning at it. “No juice, man.”

“Oh, well, can you try again?”

Klaus sinks into the couch, and frowns. “Didn’t I _just say--”_

“Well, _excuse me_ for asking!”

Their squabble is cut off by Allison, tapping on the coffee table with the butt of her pen.

Once she sees she’s gained their attention, she straightens, and produces her notebook: `Is that what you did @ Icarus?`

“Oh, yeah.” Klaus thinks back to that night. “Turns out I can do a lot and I just never really considered it.”

“We lasted a lot longer, this time,” Ben muses. 

And Klaus nods, considering it. It’s only the second time he’s ever done this, but his brain is buzzing with ideas: Maybe it’s as much to do with what the ghost intends to do as it is with his own energy. _Maybe,_ if the ghost just wants to talk, it’s easier to grab hold and keep them in the mortal plane, whereas--

Klaus’s rumination is cut short. Ben is tapping at his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Did you just hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“On the radio. They said something about an explosion?”

“What?”

“Yeah, right there. ‘Massive damage.’ Did you hear that?”

“Well, no, I actually didn’t. And what does it matter? What do we care about an explosion? That sounds like a problem for the proper authorities, which we are not.”

Allison is mouthing, _what’s he saying?_

“Because it’s on _Jefferson.”_

“Come again?”

“The street we landed on? Didn’t you read the signs?”

“You know, I always kind of forget about those. I’m more of a landmark kind of guy when it comes to finding my way around. Take Midtown for example? Still don’t know most of the street names, but I can tell you _exactly_ how to get from Morrison Park down to the waterfront just based on all the tourist trappy statues on the side of--”

Allison’s notebook lands in his lap.

`? `has been circled. Six times.

 _Sorry,_ he mouths.

She slaps his knee, pouting furiously.

Behind them, the radio crackles on: “... would advise all pedestrians and commuters to avoid the area for the near and immediate future. To those of you looking to take in a picture at the Avon, it appears that the front of the picture house has been destroyed, though the interior...”

 _Avon,_ Allison mouths, and then she gets it.

`The street we arrived on,` she writes. 

“I’m guessing someone just landed,” breathes Ben.

“Well, it can’t be one of _us,”_ Klaus reasons, _“Think_ about it: none of us can blow anything up except…”

Vanya.

Allison springs to her feet, and runs for her purse.

“You don’t think…” Ben trails off, watching Klaus scurry across the floor to begin shoving his boots on.

Allison’s at the door, her sweater hanging from her shoulders as she sinks her heels into the sneakers she’d kept in a box under her bed for a month. 

She turns, and waves to her brothers, the one she can see and the one she trusts is there.

 _Let’s go,_ she’s saying.

Then they’re running. 

* * *

The enemy of his enemy is his friend.

It’s an old saying, one of the ones Dad would have them memorize during dense philosophy courses, and it occurs to him now, peering over at Lila.

That’s the justification Diego used, when she slid into his shadow after they’d slipped out of Shineyview, and stayed there. His logic at the time had gone: They’d both been opposed to the hospital, united in the common purpose of escape, and she’d proven herself trustworthy in that regard, so why not the outside as well? 

And on the outside, she is proving herself to be even more useful. 

The very first thing she’d done, once they’d been on the streets again, was head straight to a motel, at her request, so they might break into a room and steal some clothes.

“They’ll know to look for us in what we were wearing when we were committed, see?” she tells him, as he tugs her through a window, and into a room that they’ve concluded belongs to a young couple, who seem to be out dancing for hours and have therefore left their room safe to enter. “This way, we fit in. And if we act like we belong, we _will_ belong.”

The sentiment is very _Allison_ of her, and he likes it.

“After all,” she adds, selecting a white turtleneck from a suitcase and holding it to her chest, evaluating herself in the mirror. “You can’t exactly walk around in _that.”_

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

Lila peers at him through the mirror, grimacing. “And why exactly _were_ you picked up in the first place?”

Diego glances down, at his holey sweater, at the prominent belt of knives glinting in the dull golden light. 

Point made. He starts digging through the suitcase, and definitely isn’t watching Lila slide the turtleneck over her smooth, dark back. He’s just looking at her hair is all, at the stripes of faded red dye feathered through it. That’s all. That’s _all._

In the end, they’ve found their disguises, and they’re on the road, behind the wheel of a car she’s broken into, and he’s hotwired. Diego hasn’t slept a wink all night, and he’s never felt more alive. 

He’s free again. No more prodding questions and prodding needles. No more claustrophobic white rooms and restraints. He’s free, and he’s going to find his family, and he’s going to save the world.

They prowl the streets for hours until the sun comes up, Diego tapping his fingers urgently on the wheel as he scans the passing buildings for anything he recognizes. His companion draws her lean legs up to her chest, to run her fingers along the mottling of deep purplish bruising on her knees.

Lila hasn’t made any demands of him yet, only peers up at him from beneath her ragged black bangs, regarding him as curiously as one might look at a strange insect scuttling across a window.

 _She doesn’t have a plan,_ he thinks. _Getting out was all she’d thought to do, and now that she’s free, she doesn’t know where to go from here. She might not have anywhere to go at all._

Diego reaches down, to where the rabbit’s foot hangs around his neck, and winds the chain slowly around his finger. He decides that he won’t ask her to leave just yet. He won’t mind a little company, until he finds his family. They’ll figure things out then.

They carry on in silence, until finally, _finally,_ he sees it: the peak of the movie theater’s entrance, the black lettering of _Kiss of the Vampire_ emblazoned overhead.

He’s found it.

Diego draws in a sharp breath, swelling with anticipation, and beside him Lila straightens, peering at him questioningly.

He pulls over with a jerk, and he’s sprinting into the alley he’d landed in weeks ago, the morning chill making him wince.

He figures it out as he runs: He’s going to go over the alley with a fine-toothed comb to see if anyone else in his family had landed there, either before or after he had. He’s going to find proof that they were here, proof he’d missed because he’d been so sick he could barely think, and he’s going to track them down. He’s going to be the one to bring everyone together and--

And there’s someone hunched up behind the dumpster. 

Diego’s got his hands on the buttons of his shirt, tugging it open to reach for where he’s fastened the knife harness, just beneath it, but then he freezes.

He’s close enough to make out the familiar shade of gray of the coat, the slope of the shoulders…

“Luther?”

His voice bounces down the alleyway, and his brother perks up like a puppy whose heard his name called.

For a single golden moment, the weight of the unpleasant history between Luther and Diego melts away, and they’re just happy to have found each other, to know that they’ve survived, that they aren’t alone. They crush each other in a tight embrace, each feeling the bright glow of the joy of reunion wash over them. Luther smells like the garbage he’s been sleeping in, and for about a second, Diego doesn’t care at all.

“Honestly, I thought you’d be Klaus,” Luther admits, tugging away.

“What?”

“He was here.”

“You’re _kidding.”_

“I mean, I didn’t see him, but he left a note. See? Down there?”

Diego squats down, and follows the direction Luther’s pointing in. “Well. That’s very Klaus.”

“Right? It’s _gotta_ be him. You know, I’ve been thinking, I just landed yesterday, and…” Luther squints, looking Diego up and down, taking note of the change in his appearance.

“What?”

“Nice shadow.” 

Diego brings his hand up to his face, and grimaces at the scruff he finds. “I didn’t have permission to shave.”

Luther frowns, the beginnings of a question on his lips, when he leans around Diego and blinks. “Who’s that?”

Diego turns, his hand already reaching into his shirt.

Lila has followed him. She’s peering into the alleyway, her eyes raking over Luther with a sort of inquisitive hunger as she clicks towards them with her bright red shoes. She seems to be composing a dozen comments about his body, but is smartly deciding to keep them to herself.

“I told you to stay with the car!” Diego hisses.

“No you didn’t!” Lila throws up her hands, “You just _flew_ off without me, what was I _meant_ to think?”

“I’m sorry,” hovers Luther, _“Who_ are you?”

“Oh,” Lila sidesteps Diego, reaching out to extend a slender hand to Luther, which he shakes, “Lila Pitts, lovely to meet you. And your name is...”

“Luther Hargreeves. His brother.”

 _“Adopted_ brother.”

Lila’s eyes flit between the two of them for a moment, her mouth pressed in an impish line. 

“And your family makes a habit out of hanging out in sketchy alleyways?”

“Well, Diego does,” Luther snarks. “This would be my first time.”

Diego bristles. _Why are you making a joke about it, I was doing serious work, dangerous work that was actually helping..._

The chain’s digging into his neck. He reaches up and tugs at it.

 _You weren’t,_ chides Eudora’s voice, bright and clear in his head. _You weren’t, and you know you weren’t. You were there to help yourself, not anyone else._

He bites the inside of his cheek. He’s zoning out.

“We met at the asylum,” Lila is saying.

And oh, _fuck him,_ now Luther has enough ammo to make him miserable for weeks. Diego’s sure he’s thinking up a hundred insults right now, all to slash at him later.

“You were…” 

“In an asylum.” Diego grits out, “I got arrested my first night here, and I was locked up. In an asylum. For two weeks.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that checks out.”

“And what’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Diego snarls.

“Probably exactly what you’re thinking it does.” Luther crosses his arms.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah--”

“Great,” says Lila, clapping her hands together, the beads around her wrists chattering. “What exactly _are_ you doing here?”

“Oh,” says Luther. “I’m waiting for our family. We…” He glances at Diego, who shrugs, tugging at his collar. “We’re not from here, and there was this… _accident,_ and we got separated when we got to the city. Except, I got here yesterday, and it seems like Diego got here a while ago, and I was thinking that if I just stay put someone would show up eventually--”

“Hang on,” Diego says, “You’ve been here the _whole_ time? Sitting here like a bum?”

“Well, no,” Luther admits. “I had to go to the bathroom, so I took a break for like an hour or two to use the one across the street.”

Diego groans. Of _course_ Luther’s up on himself about his conviction, but when it comes down to it, he blinks. It’s _so_ like him.

“You didn’t go in the alley?”

Lila and Luther stare at him in disgust.

“What? It’s an alleyway. It’s basically what they’re here for.”

“If you can get arrested for it, I’d say no,” frowns Lila, but Diego isn’t paying her much mind.

“And _wait--”_ It’s just occurred to him, and oh, his chest is _burning_ with anger. “You’ve _been_ here, and you could’ve come gotten me from the hospital and you just… sat on your ass.”

“Diego, how would I have known--”

He isn’t listening. He’s pacing the width of the alley like an anxious cat, counting off on his fingers as they step out into the street. “So that’s three of us here. You, me and Klaus, and if Klaus is here, Ben’s here, right? Right. So that’s four. And that leaves Allison, Five and Vanya still unaccounted for. So either they’re not here yet at all, they’re somewhere else entirely, or they got here already, and they’re off somewhere.”

“Yes, Diego, I’ve thought of all of that already.”

“Great, are we gonna get moving? I’m not gonna sit on my ass and _wait_ for them when they could be out there _right now--”_

A necessary aside: Days ago, when Number Five had sent a shower of Commission-branded candies scattering across the bar, and each of his brothers had imbibed them, Luther had unknowingly eaten the only one in the bunch that had been a tracking device in disguise. It had been the beacon that had led the squad of Commission assassins to them at Icarus Theater.

Said aside was necessary, because, though the tracker has since passed through Luther’s system, it had not done so before pinging the Academy’s arrival in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963. It had not done so before attracting one last set of foes.

Now, said foes have caught up to them.

At the end of the street, a trio of men have descended on them, unseen and unheard thanks to the heatedness of the argument. They’re clad in long, heavy coats, designed in part to obscure the teal of their Temps Commission Corrections Agent uniforms, and in part to delay the realizations of passers-by that each of them is carrying a horrifically large gatling gun.

The names of said three agents have recently been lost in the incineration of a significant portion of the Commission Home Office, and as a result, the only scrap of information that had managed to survive the blaze, that of their country of origin, will suffice to identify them by: These are the Swedes.

The trio is comprised of a man who is tall, a man who is short, and a man who is neither tall nor short. They are all white-haired and caught at an ambiguous state of age, one that makes any person who witnesses them standing side by side squint in confusion, attempting to place the order of their ages. They are similar enough in their features to pass for brothers, though whether they actually are is a hotly debated topic among those in the Temps Commission who’ve been unfortunate enough to encounter them.

They are here, chasing a path that had been blazed by an assassination squad two days ago. The trio occupies the slightly infuriating position of Second Most Senior Assassination Team, and are here to contest that ranking, through the delivery of a successful hit.

Though the Temps Commission praises uniformity above all, it allows a certain sort of freedom to its field agents. After completing basic training, each assassin is allowed to develop his, her or their own specific brand of killing. Number Five’s had been infamously precise, and notoriously adaptable, but always performed with a clinical detachment. The Swedes apply a similar sort of objectivity to their work, however, they are far less subtle in their methods. 

This accounts for how they choose to make their presence known to their marks: by interrupting Luther and Diego’s quarrel with a barrage of gunfire. 

Ordinarily, Luther and Diego, of like minds in an immediate life-or-death crisis, might have leapt at the chance to dispatch a clear and obvious enemy. 

But this is not an ordinary situation for either of them. The two of them, exhausted, lost and each clinging to their last strings of sanity, simply do not have the presence of mind to combat an ambush.

Instead, when the pavement is torn to dust in front of them, Luther and Diego, of like minds in an immediate life-or-death crisis, make a different choice.

They run like fuck for the car.

Luther owes his ability to sprint through a field of gunfire without dying horrifically to his power, to the incredible strength he’s been bestowed by forces unknown that manifests itself in astonishing invulnerability to the likes of most bullets or ballistics, so long as he isn't under continued barrage.

Diego chalks it up to dumb luck on his part, and he’ll take it. 

He dives behind the front wheel, as Luther goes burrowing into the backseat.

 _Wait,_ Diego thinks suddenly: _Lila._

And then she’s there, leaping like a gazelle into the passenger’s seat, utterly untouched. It seems that his own luck has rubbed off on her, and he’s grateful.

Diego drives recklessly, screeching unevenly across the road as the last pelleting of bullets bursts through the rear window and digs into the backseat. 

“Faster!” cries Luther, thumping the front seat.

“Oh, what do _you_ have to complain about?” Diego snaps, “One hits you, it bounces right off. Worst comes to worst, you just pull it out of your ass later!”

“That doesn’t mean I _like_ getting shot, Diego, you know how much that _hurts?”_

“Oh God,” groans Lila from the passengers’ side seat, squeezing into the floorspace and twisting her arms above her head.

But they’ve escaped.

They’re alive, and they’re scuffed up, but they’re alive, and…

 _And,_ Diego realizes. _It’s just like it was with Hazel and Cha-Cha. We have targets on our backs again._

He stares over at Lila, and the chain digs urgently into his neck.

“You need to go,” Diego says, pulling over sharply, sharp enough to send Luther bouncing off the front seat. He reaches across Lila’s lap to tug the door open.

 _“Excuse_ me?”

“You heard me.” Diego gestures aggressively. “Get out of the car, _now._ Look, Lila, I’m sorry. I don’t love that I’m dumping you off on the side of the road like this, but I didn’t exactly expect to get shot at today.”

“And why on earth would you think I’d be any safer _out there?”_

“Trust me when I say that those guys that ran after us? They’re after us.”

“They’re definitely after us,” contributes Luther. Diego elbows the back of his seat.

“They’re after us, and us only. So if you’re not with us, they’ll have no reason to hurt you.”

Lila’s eyes narrow. “I think I’d rather stay.”

The last threads of Diego’s patience snap.

_Alright. I tried. Fuck it._

Diego opts to handle the problem the way he handles most problems: with all the delicacy of a sledgehammer.

He leans over, and shoves her out of the car.

She lands on the sidewalk, staring up at him with a look of detached, catlike amusement that really doesn’t help his mood. 

_See?_ he thinks, _She’s not scared. She knows she’ll be fine._

“Here’s looking at you,” he tells her, giving her a little salute, as he tugs the door shut.

Diego peels off the curb as fast as he can, digging the pad of his thumb into the small, blunt claws of the rabbit’s foot. He refuses to look back behind him, to check in the mirrors. It’s easier if you don’t look back. That way, there’ll be no room for doubt to set in. He kept her safe. He did the right thing. 

_“So,”_ Luther begins, an ever-familiar tinge of disapproval shading his voice, but Diego throws up a hand.

“Don’t start. Don’t _fucking_ start.”

He does.

And Diego is trapped in a car for hours with Luther, subject to every last word.

They’re driving aimlessly now, turning at random, stopping at random, peering at the passing blur of brick and glass that’s utterly alien to them, circling so many times they actually begin to remember street names. 

And they’re arguing. Yelling themselves hoarse, about circling back for Klaus, about where Allison could’ve wandered to, about whether Vanya landed unconscious somewhere, about how much of an asskicking Diego’s going to give Five whenever the little shit blinks out of oblivion.

And then, a veritable _stream_ of police cars and fire trucks come blaring past.

Diego stops, like so many other cars do, and he leans out the window, to see a column of gray-brown smoke rising back from the direction they’d come.

He peers at Luther, in the rear-view mirror.

They glance at each other, of like minds once more.

“What are the odds…”

“Probably pretty good.”

Diego steps on the gas. 

* * *

When she was a child, the logic that Vanya had subscribed to was the logic of little girls, one built on a backbone of fairy tales. Vanya, a loyal reader of such tales, as there were many volumes in her father’s library, had devoured their lessons greedily. She’d been in love with the thought that an ordinary, drab girl might be plucked from her humdrum life and made into a princess, that a heroine can win the love of a wondrous family through nothing more than proving herself to be exceptionally attentive and virtuous. 

Vanya’s warmest, most vibrant dream was that of being welcomed into the fold by her siblings, a dream well-suited to such logic, especially for a girl as ordinary as Vanya thought herself to be. She’d spend long hours nurturing that secret hope, feeding it with hours spent observing them, filing away the littlest details about them so she might love them better. She’d been ever-prepared for the day her hidden task would arrive, the one that would seem innocuous at first, but would reveal itself after she’d succeeded to be the one that would throw the doors open to a jewel-bright world made warm with her family’s love and adoration. She would prove herself, and they would be in awe of her, and she would take her rightful place at the heart of them all, as the one who would draw each and every one of her siblings together.

It’s a cruel sort of irony, that the first time Vanya truly draws her siblings together is the very night she dreads attracting their attention most.

Vanya is limping through a city she has no idea how to navigate. She’s been wandering for hours without pause, and her legs have long since gone numb and prickling with exhaustion. She’s having trouble stringing a coherent thought together, only knowing that she must walk and keep walking, as a shark must keep swimming and swimming, unless it wants to drown.

Her ear has long since ceased bleeding, leaving behind a rusty brown crust on the shell of her ear and a pool of red marring the right shoulder of her suit, no longer pristine and white, but streaked with the gray-brown stains of rubble. She’s still half-submerged in silence, a silence that unbalances her and renders her gait a perpetually unsteady lope. 

It’s very clear what has happened to her, but Vanya is not in a state to process it.

She is not in a state to process _anything;_ not the state of her own body, nor even the time she’s landed in. She is still lost, deep in that dark space within herself, a space that is growing and growing within her. Fear had seeped into the creases of Vanya’s mind, oozing in deep and coagulating over her ability to think logically, choking it under a deep sludge of terror, and fear remains. Fear is driving her, and she is content to leave it in control, to allow herself to be carried by the instinct of a wild thing, a hunted thing, a thing with sharp teeth that might snap off the fingers of any hands raised against her. 

She hasn’t said so much as a single word, since she’d landed this afternoon, but her mind is howling like a storm.

Evening is creeping upon her now, making all the shadows long and lean and bluish, reaching up to grab at Vanya’s legs like witch fingers, and it is then, with the crimson rim of sunset bleeding down into the horizon, that they find her. 

It’s uncertain, which of the two factions of the Hargreeves family find her first, only that they stumble across each other in the exact same moment, the moment they look up the street, and see the silver-white flash, and know, deep in their guts, that they’ve found Vanya.

She’s not hard to miss; here, in the milky purple light of twilight, Vanya practically glows.

There’s a disturbance in the air, roiling about her in waves, a dark sort of shimmering that clings to her and the space around her. It’s her power, making itself known in the same way a wolf might raise its hackles.

The scattered Hargreeves siblings first see each other through that veil of distortion, like they’re staring through a tear in the universe itself, into a mirror world where another version of their sibling is peering back at them. 

And for a moment, they’re all still, watching each other, watching Vanya, who’s come to a halt.

They’ve spent so long searching, that it’s dawned on each and every one of the siblings that none of them has _any_ idea what to do, now that they’ve _found_ her.

The silence is shattered.

“Hey!” Diego barks, as he leaps out of the car, “Vanya!” 

“Oh God,” Luther mutters, crawling out after Diego, and tearing after him, “Oh God, okay.” 

Vanya goes rigid, hunches under the weight of her power, and practically _snarls._

_They’re circling me now, they’ve flanked me, Allison and Klaus from one end and Luther and Diego on the other, and now they’ve boxed me in again, they’re backing me up against this building, oh, they’re clever, they’ve planned this._

Vanya staggers back, an uneven sway in her gait that catches Ben’s eye, and makes him pause his persistent urging in Klaus’s ear to _come on, do it, please, make me physical again, hurry, now’s the time!_

He stops in his tracks, and narrows his eyes. Something’s wrong.

“She’s _hurt,”_ realizes Ben, when a tangle of silver hair slips back from Vanya’s shoulder, and he can see the shock of rusty red blooming across her shoulder.

“She’s hurt,” repeats Klaus, and Allison swivels her head to stare at him in appreciation. 

_(“Hey!”_ snaps Ben.)

Klaus doesn’t acknowledge him. His back is to him, and he’s busy calling Vanya’s name, waving his arms with Allison as they pick up speed. 

They’re running towards her now, all four of them, Vanya realizes, her heart slamming in her chest. She can’t tell what they intend to do when they reach her, but she doesn’t plan to find out. 

Her whole body is vibrating, threatening to shake her apart from the inside. She’s trembling with terrible desire, the impulse to kill them and be _done_ with it, but anything will do, anything to make them stop and _stay away._

There is no sound Vanya can grasp onto immediately, so in the throes of panic, she makes her own.

Vanya screams, high and terrible as a banshee, setting loose a tidal wave of power. 

She doesn’t have the full range she’d had in the Icarus that night, only has half of it. And what’s worse, she doesn’t have her bow to channel it through.

Her outburst leaves her in messy, sloshing waves, splashing out and digging vicious gouges into the street, shattering a street’s worth of windows and sending a storm of glass raining down on them. It’s messy, and weak, and horribly sloppy.

But it’s enough. 

A sheet of brick shears loose from the building at Vanya’s back, torrenting down in a ruddy tide that sweeps her siblings out of sight and out of mind. 

They survive, in large part because they’ve all dived under Luther’s enormous torso, the way they would as children when a wall would collapse upon them. It’s fitting, that the first family group hug since the apocalypse would be incomplete and informal, under extreme duress.

"Well, team," says Klaus from the very bottom of the puppy pile, "I think that went well, don't you?"

By the time they’ve wormed their way out of the rubble, Vanya is gone, and the path to her is coated in serrated shards of glass, glistening like a scattering of jagged stars.

* * *

On the sixth hour of the twenty-second of November, 1963, Five Hargreeves lands, splashes down into the alleyway that each and every one of his siblings had landed in, slipping and stumbling onto his knees in a puddle of brackish water in an alleyway in Dallas, Texas.

He lands alone.

The scratches on his hands are only an hour old, scarcely closed, and now they’re stinging and smearing blood across the pavement. A slimy, half-decayed leaf sticks to his knee, and he peels it off in disgust, flicking it away.

It’s a chilled, misty morning, and light rain is spitting onto his shoulders, and his skin is crawling from an entirely different sensation, a far more viscerally unpleasant one. But Five is a seasoned time traveler, deeply familiar with the side effects of skipping points on a timeline, and highly disciplined in his management of the symptoms, so he shakes his head, swallows thickly, and looks up, determined to hit the ground running.

He is greeted by the muzzle of a gun, so close to his eyes that he cannot focus on it, so close that he could tilt his face up and touch it, if he were so inclined.

Behind it, the leg of a familiar teal suit, and, as Five’s eyes creep upwards, he is greeted by a completely unfamiliar head.

There isn’t just _one_ Commission assassin staring him down, Five realizes, craning his head around to find himself utterly surrounded, to find himself boxed in by a wall of blue-clad corrections agents, to find them perched on the rooftop and peering down at him through the sights of their rifles.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” growls the man with the gun to his head.

“You know,” Five drawls, in an effort to buy time, “I'm a little surprised. It isn’t standard protocol of the Temps to make such a spectacle--”

There’s a whir of black, an excruciating explosion erupting in his temple, and then nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major divergences right off the bat:
> 
> 1\. No major time skip. They scatter temporally, but over a period of days-to-weeks, not years (Therefore: Allison isn’t married to Raymond, Luther isn’t working for Ruby, Klaus never starts his cult and is still newly-sober, and Diego isn’t over Eudora’s death). This frees everyone up to hit the ground running much faster.
> 
> 2\. No amnesia. Vanya remembers everything. (Therefore, no Sissy and no Harlan, her reconciliation with the family will take actual time and not be handed to her on a silver platter as an afterthought, and the main plot of the arc revolves around Vanya, rather than JFK’s assassination)
> 
> 3\. No second apocalypse. It was fine, but ultimately unnecessary; they have the first one to fix, after all.


	2. hardly call humane

Five awakens groggily, to a deep ache in his neck. He grimaces, cracking it and wincing at the _crack_ of his spine popping in his ears, and finally forces his eyes open. 

He peers around, at the whitewashed cabinetry, the embedded shelving heavy with attractive leather-bound volumes in pleasing shades of teal, maroon and emerald, books that have probably never been read, that may well just be decorative. The large, clean windows, with watery sunlight streaming in. The enormous desk, with a stack of files laid out neatly in front of a leather chair, a bottle of red nail polish still waiting to be used. The box, still sitting on a side table, still containing the suit that’d been tailored for him only days ago.

He’s in the Handler’s office.

Five draws in a hissing breath, and makes to leap to his feet, to force himself out of the chair he’d sat in a week ago, to blink out of the office, out of the building, anywhere as long as it’s not here--

And he can’t.

There’s a sharp, digging pain in his wrists, the clinking of metal.

Five looks down, and seethes at the realization that he’s been handcuffed to the chair. 

Five tugs at the restraints, listening to the scrape of metal against the fine wood, and there’s a voice behind him.

“Please do stop struggling. If you damage the chair, we’ll have to bill you for it, and don’t you think you’ve done quite enough damage already?”

The voice is cold and robotic, buzzing with feedback, as if emanating from a disrepaired intercom. He’s heard it before. 

There are footfalls behind him, deep and laborious and clunking, like those of a deep sea diver’s. He knows them, he can’t ever forget the sound of them.

Five goes rigid. Everything, even his heart, is still, as the person behind him slowly ambles his way into the corner of his peripheral vision.

He’d only ever interacted with A.J. Carmichael once in his brief stint with the Commission, but it’d been enough. He remembers that day distinctly, when the rate of success among his marks had been singled out as remarkable, when the Board of Directors had taken exceptional interest in him, and had sent Carmichael to single him out and inform him that he would no longer be limited to causing natural disasters, or exterminating paradoxically mutated strains of Neanderthal, as many agents do. No, Five wasn’t like most agents; he’s _special,_ and special agents are tasked with the correction of very important persons.

He remembers that meeting. He remembers what it’d lead to. 

Even his presence is enough to set Five at unease; looking at him, at the bulky robot body straining in its designer suit, at the enormous glass bowl it’d been built to carry, at the little oranda goldfish floating inside.

 _Wait, no, not an oranda, a shubunkin goldfish,_ Five corrects himself automatically; Carmichael is notoriously touchy about his breed being recognized accurately. Supposedly, he'd once smashed a secretary's head in with a stapler for getting it wrong.

Five isn’t quite certain if he’d been a person once, and simply had his mental faculties transferred to a fishy body after a particularly unfortunate accident on the job, that he’d been genetically engineered from some glob of DNA, or if he’d been an actual goldfish who’d somehow gained the ability to speak, genius-level intelligence, and the strategic instincts of Nathan Bedford Forrest. He’s sure there are a few betting pools among Commission personnel.

“I realize that you and I haven’t had much time to build rapport,” gurgles Carmichael, sliding into the slick leather chair that had once been the Handler’s, “Seeing as you left so quickly.”

Five stares down at his cuffs again, tugging like a rebellious dog against his leash. 

Then, he stops.

His hands are totally healed. His palms are pale and smooth and unmarred by scratches, his nails clean of any embedded blood or dirt. He stares at them, flexing his fingers, turning them over and over.

_They’d changed them while I was sleeping._

The visceral urge to put the wounds back flashes in his mind, burning bright and terrible as a lightning flash, but Five doesn’t have time to dwell on that. 

He looks up and glares. 

“How’d you know where to find me?”

Carmichael chooses not to respond. He simply continues polishing the brass frame of the little photograph he’d been carrying, before setting it cleanly down on the desk. Five thinks he’s seen it before somewhere, a slightly grainy black-and-white portrait of a little girl with stringy dark hair and large eyes, but he shrugs it off. 

“Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be me handling special circumstances, such as yours,” the speaker mounted on Carmichael’s chest fizzles, “However, as current Acting Chair of the Board of Directors--” 

Oh, there he goes. Thirty seconds in, and he can’t stop preening about his position. 

“--It falls to me to brief you. Especially seeing as your old handler is currently a pile of ash.”

 _Just another cog,_ Five thinks, digging his nails into the arms of his chair.

“You know, personally, I never really liked her much. I thought she was incredibly unprofessional at times, really made a _nightmare_ of things for H.R. And in my opinion, she took Bring Your Daughter To Work Day _far_ too seriously. But, she always delivered, so that was that.”

Five exhales sharply through his nose.

“Quite unfortunate, what happened to her,” gurgles Carmichael insincerely, “You’ve made such a mess of things here. The setbacks created by those fires you started will take an inordinate amount of time to fix. Of course, having all of it-- time, I mean-- we’ll recover.”

Five’s seething.

“What do you want?” he snarls. 

“Well, Number Five, it’s quite simple.” Carmichael steeples his fingers. “We just want you to finish the job.”

_Oh, what, the fucking Hindenburg?_

“That’s unfortunate,” he replies through his teeth, “Because I’m no longer in the practice of doing anything anyone wants me to do.”

_I need my family. They slipped out of my fingers, and I need to find them._

_“Most_ unfortunate,” agrees Carmichael. “Because the Board sees you as a valuable asset to the organization. An expensive acquisition, and a prize worth hunting until it has been captured. Or killed.”

Carmichael runs his robotic fingertips over the manila folders spread over his desk, plucking one up and thumbing through it. Inside his globe, he swims forward to peer through the glass. 

“I’m not going to do it, you know,” Five crows. “I’m not helping with whatever you’ve got for me.”

“Oh, I think you will.” 

Carmichael sets the folder flat down on the desk, sliding it towards him.

Five leans forward, and blinks.

He isn’t looking at the Hindenburg. It’s…

“JFK? You really want me to go all the way back and--”

“Finish your final mission as a Corrections Agent, yes. That’s all we’ll require from you.”

“Well, I won’t.”

Carmichael sighs, a sputter of feedback from his speaker, and his little fish body does a frustrated loop around his globe. 

“Well, can’t say I didn’t expect some resistance.”

He reaches for the second folder, and presents it to Five.

Inside is a photo of a woman he’s never seen before, staring at the camera in clear distress. She’s tied to a chair in a nondescript room he’s never seen before. Clearly a captive.

Internally, Five’s stomach clenches. 

He carefully adopts a mask of aloofness, and sighs, as if inconvenienced.

“And _why_ am I supposed to show concern for your hostage?”

“Because she's your biological mother. And right now, I’ve got two agents with their zappers trained on her, two days before she’s to give birth to you.”

Five’s mouth clamps shut.

Carmichael, being a goldfish, cannot emote. Five’s grateful; if he could, Five’s sure he’d be smug as a well-fed cat.

“Follow through with the assassination of President Kennedy, as per the original plan.”

_Wait… what?_

_“Original_ plan?” Five’s reedy voice cracks. 

“Yes, original plan. Prevent your past self from any interference in it.”

Five blinks.

His mind’s racing, wading into the swamp of cause and effect that is the nature of messing with any timeline. And if he were to do what Carmichael is implying, if he were to stop his past self from abandoning the mission...

“Well then, it won’t matter, will it?” Five sneers. “If I do it, I obliterate myself from the timeline. This version of me, the one that only came to be because I left the Commission, won’t come to be at all. And if I don’t, _you_ obliterate _me_ from the timeline. I’m fucked either way, so what do I care? Why bother with the false choices?”

Inside his helm, Carmichael lets loose a string of bubbles. It’s like he’s laughing at him. 

“Number Five, your mother’s going to have _twins.”_

* * *

When Odessa had agreed to let Allison stay in her house until she found her feet, she’d had a few expectations for her behavior. Namely: Allison was to pay her a certain portion of her earnings at the parlor, and to assist with cooking and chores around the house, in exchange for sleeping in the room that had been her daughter's. She was quite proud of Allison’s involvement in local politics, even if she didn’t particularly approve of the sit-in situation, and she tolerated Allison’s indifference to church (or rather, she had decided to keep asking politely, and to pray on it, in the hopes that someday Allison might come around). She trusted Allison. After all, she was nearly thirty years old, and she seemed to have a decent head on her shoulders.

But she did have several hard guidelines: Allison was not to bring any strange men into her room, she was to come home at a decent hour (herein defined as: by ten), and she was never to track dirt on her nice floor.

Tonight, Allison doesn’t break her rules, so much as she tramples over them like a drunken elephant.

Allison, after piling into Diego’s car-that-isn-his-car (which, note to self: ask about _that_ later) and making a miserable drive back to Odessa’s, had crashed in at one in the morning with three strange men on her heels, who she’d taken immediately to her bedroom, and then closed and locked the door behind them.

And, all four of them had tracked dirt and brick dust on Odessa’s nice floor.

Odessa likes to think that she isn’t a particularly nosy woman. She minds her business, and prefers not to pry in other’s affairs. 

But this? Oh, no. This, she will not tolerate. 

Odessa plants an ear to her boardee’s door, just to get a sense of what she’s walking into, and she’s immediately taken aback, realizing that she cannot understand a single word inside. That the strangers are speaking in a foreign language.

(Ben, who is peeking through the door, and had seen Odessa coming, had sounded the alarm, which Klaus had voiced, and the siblings had switched immediately to Ancient Greek, the most useless of the languages their father had taught them, and therefore the least likely to be understood, and they had carried on chatting animatedly about where they had been for the past few days, or weeks, or however long they’d been separated.)

Odessa thinks long and hard about the possible explanations for what is happening, and, given that none of such explanations are satisfactory, she decides to call in a second, third and fourth opinion.

Well, she’d only intended for the second opinion, but Raymond arrives with Miles and Jill in tow from some meeting that’d run late, and being fellow S.J.C.C. members, she figures that they are, at the minimum, decently acquainted enough with Allison to weigh in. Which, they are, albeit to far different extents; Miles, a stout, outspoken young man, knew Allison mostly through Raymond, whereas Allison had seen Jill, a bookish young woman, flitting at the edge of a meeting two weeks ago and promptly taken her under her wing, in no small part because the girl’s peculiarity had reminded her a little of Vanya, when she’d been younger. 

They arrive with news that a bomb had gone off in Oak Cliff, or maybe Kessler, and Odessa takes that frightening news, and combines it with Allison’s sudden disappearance after that stranger who’d been sniffing around South Dallas for a few days had caught her eye in front of the parlor, her vanishing for the rest of the day, and her return, banged up and covered in what Odessa now realizes is brick dust, settled so thickly on her shoulders that you couldn’t make out the red-and-purple gingham pattern of her dress.

She concludes that it does not look good for Allison, not one bit, and is grateful that her companions agree. So, she pours some coffee, the four put their heads together, and they attempt to solve the mystery of Allison Hargreeves.

“Where’d she say she was from again?” Raymond asks, “Somewhere up North, right?”

“Michigan?”

“I heard Indiana.”

“Really? I thought she’s from New York. Doesn’t she seem like she’s from New York?”

“Miles, you don’t know _anybody_ from New York.”

“Well, if anyone’s from New York, it’s her.”

“She told me she lived in California for a while,” Jill pipes up.

“When’d she tell you that?” Odessa frowns.

“Last week.”

“Okay,” Raymond says, throwing his hands up. “Okay, so. We’re all in agreement that she’s definitely not from here?”

“Nope.”

“Not from here.”

“No. I mean, no, she’s not from here. Not, no, we can’t agree.”

Raymond sighs. “Glad we could come to a consensus.” 

It’s then that Klaus pads barefoot out of Allison’s bedroom, and into the kitchen, in search of something to eat.

The foursome clam up immediately, and watch him find the materials to make a sandwich. Then, they watch him make said sandwich, and then several others.

Odessa frowns, and wonders how he’d known exactly where in her kitchen to look.

“Hi,” says Jill, immediately straightening and pushing her owlish glasses up her nose.

“You live here too?” Klaus asks.

“No, I’m, um… I’m visiting.”

“Oh.” Klaus takes a bite. “Cool.”

The cheerful buzz of the _Dick Van Dyke Show_ suddenly becomes very loud.

“I’m going to Spelman next year,” Jill says, to try and staunch the awkwardness, but only succeeding in feeding it, “I have a scholarship, you know.” 

Unknown to the four of them, Ben is sitting on the counter beside Klaus. “That’s really good!” he says. “Tell her it’s really good.”

“You shouldn’t go,” Klaus says instead, “Higher education’s a scam.”

“Klaus,” Ben snaps. “Our dad’s a billionaire. He’s literally richer than God. If it’s a scam, it sure as shit isn’t one to us. So _please_ shut up about it.” 

Klaus screws up his face at Ben, and his audience squints in suspicion after him as he trails dust back into Allison’s room, balancing the sandwiches in his hands. “Alright, which of you wanted the mustard? Diego? Luther? Come on, I can’t remember.” he’s calling as he slams the door loudly enough to rattle the framed photos on the wall. 

“I’ve got it,” Miles claps his hands together, “They’re in a cult.”

“Allison’s not in a _cult,”_ Raymond protests.

“Think about it: You ever see Allison in church?”

Odessa hums. 

“And besides? That skinny guy with the makeup? He looks like a cult leader. Think about it: what kind of man wears makeup?”

Jill frowns at him, while Raymond rests his chin on his hand, staring into space contemplatively. 

“Look,” Miles throws up his hands, “Far as we know, she’s an alien.”

“Really?” Jill sighs. 

“Yeah, really,” he snarks, “Straight from Mars. Wanna ask her about her spaceship?”

“She did show up out of nowhere,” Odessa muses. “You ever hear that story?”

“I know she was being chased,” Jill says. 

“She was, but the thing is, she was dressed so _strange._ She had these funny shoes and a strange jacket and this _hair_ that just… I’ve never seen anything like it. It's like she was wearing a costume.”

Raymond perks up, snapping his fingers in realization. “Did any of you see that tattoo? The one on the skinny white boy’s arm? That symbol?”

“I did.”

“Yeah?”

“Allison has one _just_ like it. On her arm, same place as his. She always has it covered with a sleeve or something, but I’ve seen it a few times. And whenever she caught me, she’d always hide it.”

Ben, who has lingered to listen in on their conversation, feels his gut clench. 

“Oh, come on,” Jill protests. “So what if they have tattoos? He had some on his hands too, and Allison doesn’t have any hand tattoos. It doesn’t mean anything, see? Lots of people are getting them now.”

Odessa hums in disagreement. 

“You think they all have ‘em?” asks Miles. 

“I think,” Raymond says, mulling over his words carefully, “That it’s odd that Allison shows up out of nowhere a month ago, dressed all weird, with no address, no friends, no family, not a dollar to her name, and that she doesn’t ever talk about where she comes from, but she’s got that tattoo. And that _scar_ she has--”

“She said it was an accident,” says Jill.

“I don’t know if I believe that anymore,” admits Raymond. “And _now,_ this group of white men--”

“--And that Cuban,” adds Odessa.

 _Cuban?_ Ben thinks. 

“They all show up,” Raymond continues, “Also out of nowhere. Also all dressed strange, all talking strange. And at least one of ‘em has that same tattoo. And you saw those knives, right?”

“What?”

“One of those men has a bunch of knives. I saw ‘em when I was on my way in; they had the door open for a second.”

“... My God.”

“You think she’s a criminal?”

“I… Listen.” He turns to Miles, “Remember the sit-in? We came up with it together, but she was _real_ serious about us doing it on the tenth. I know she said it was about Kennedy, but what if it _wasn’t?_ What if she _knew_ all that was going to happen? What if she _wanted_ it to happen?” 

Odessa’s brow furrows. 

“You remember I was getting beat by that cop, right?” he asks Miles.

“‘Course I remember, I was _right there.”_

“You remember him stopping?”

“Yeah?”

“He stopped because Allison walked right up to him, and whispered something to him.”

“She _what?”_ asks Odessa.

“You hear what she said?” frowns Miles.

“No, but what could she have _possibly_ said to make him stop? Have you ever seen anything quite like that in your _life?”_

One by one, each of them shakes their head. 

“What are you saying?” asks Jill.

Raymond swallows. “I’ve been thinking about this for days now, but after tonight it just… well. If all of these things are connected, which they sure do seem to be, then it looks like she’s a plant.” 

“What, like, a _spy?_ What _for?”_

Raymond swallows slowly, and nods. “She joined the S.J.C.C. and had all these _ideas_ and… and now I’m wondering if she’s trying to sabotage the movement, you know? If that’s what she was sent here to do? Break us up from the inside?”

“So,” Odessa muses, “When she came running into my beauty parlor, that wasn’t real? It was a trick to get into my house?”

“I mean, you believed it, right?”

Odessa nods gravely, casting a suspicious glance down the hall.

“You’re _sure_ about this?”

“I don’t know,” Raymond says. “But I don’t think we can trust her.” 

They fall into an uneasy silence, staring down the hall to the spare room, watching blots of shadow dance across the bar of light leaking from the bottom of the door, listening to the soft, muffled noise of three strange voices rumbling. 

Ben chooses then to pass down the hall and through the door to the room Allison’s staying in, and recount his findings to Klaus.

“Well, _fuck,”_ he responds, and passes the unfortunate news on to the others.

Allison’s mouth drops open and she snatches her notepad, charging out the door.

“See, I told you we should just leave,” says Diego unhelpfully. 

Allison walks into the kitchen, and is greeted with a wall of faces that leave her feeling very much like a teenage girl caught coming home late after an illicit night out.

`I am not a spy,` she brandishes in front of the four.

And then realizes that there should be no way she would have known they were discussing her, unless she had been spying on them. 

_Shit._

Allison opens her mouth, purely on reflex, and a sound croaks out of her, miserable and malformed. She clamps her mouth shut, draws a hand up over it, and grumbles in frustration. 

`I’m from the future. `

_“... What?”_ barks Odessa. “The _future?”_

“It’s true,” pipes up Luther from over Allison’s shoulder. “We’re time travelers. We’re from 2019.”

`They’re my brothers,` Allison explains.

Which helps in no way whatsoever.

So, Allison squeezes `adopted ` in above `brothers`, which also doesn’t help.

`We have powers, `she tries, again, unsuccessfully. 

“Can we go?” asks Diego. “Can we just get the car and go? Why do you care about these people? We need to go get Vanya and find Five.”

Klaus, ruminating in the back of the crowd clogging the narrow hall, straightens, clapping his hands together. He thinks he’s got it: They need to do something flashy, something impossible to ignore.

So, he grits his teeth, balls his hands into fists, and conjures Ben, who pops into being, sitting on the table amidst their very confused audience. 

“Oh, thanks, man,” Ben says, turning to his shell-shocked surrounders, “Hi everybody. I’m Ben, also her brother, and yes, I'm a ghost. Great seeing you. My sister's telling the truth. We’re from the future, and we have powers. Oh, and, uh, Jill, that’s your name, right? Jill, don’t listen to my brother. He gives bad advice. Go to school.”

It takes about a minute, for their jaws to leave the floor. 

In that time, Allison has written something for Raymond, which she rips from her notebook and places in his hands.

`I told you once that I was waiting for someone. `

Ray draws in a breath, staring up at her sharply. The look in his eyes softens, and she knows that he’ll believe her now. 

`He’s here. And so is the rest of my family.`

After that, it gets a lot easier.

* * *

After escaping her family, Vanya, like any hunted animal, had taken to the wilderness.

Or rather, the closest thing to the wilderness that she could find, being dropped in the middle of a strange city that she now recognized to be Dallas, Texas, by the license plates on the cars she’d leaned against, gasping for breath. 

She’s not _just_ in Texas, she reminds herself. She’s in Texas in the _past._ She’d been time-traveled, she and Luther and Allison and Diego and Klaus and Five, who’d surely been the one who’d taken them here, who must be lurking somewhere, even if she hadn’t seen him among the siblings as they’d ambushed her. 

_They’d time-traveled her here to trap her,_ that vicious needle-toothed fear snarls at her from deep within her mind, and she had listened, accepting it as fact. She’d been brought here to be hunted in territory she could not hope to recognize. She’d been brought here to be killed. 

The thought had propelled her, had urged life into her aching legs and her numbing feet, and had sent her deeper into the park, deeper into the gnarled arms of the branches that would guard her, at least for a little while.

The Moon had been above her, thin and silver as a cat’s claw, yet somehow able to peer down at her piteously, giving rise to the strange thought bubbling up from the depths of her subconscious, the idea that Vanya might reach out and touch it and watch it shatter like a china plate at the touch of her fingertip.

She’d shaken it off, deeply unsettled by it, unsure of where it’d come from, and shrunk in the Moon’s harsh silver light, scouring her like a spotlight. For some reason, she’d felt like it might burn her, and had gone crawling through the underbrush, deeper and deeper, until she’d found refuge in the form of a drainage pipe, large enough to hold her.

Vanya’s there now, hunched over like a hunted thing, her shoulders brushing the rounded ceiling of her new abode, her backside digging into the thick film of leaf litter that’s clogged the bottom. She’d lost one of her boots somewhere in the undergrowth, and her sock is slimy with mud that’s made her toes go numb hours ago.

It’s a little like a coffin in here, she supposes; long and low and in the right sort of shape, filling her nostrils with the strong stench of decay, and so dark inside that Vanya feels like she may be blind as well as deaf.

Or, half-deaf, rather.

She’d figured it out, after the panic had drained from her, and she’d been better able to understand the strange crystalline ringing in her right ear, the odd spell of weightlessness that had enchanted only half of her body, and left the undue burden of steadying herself on the other half. 

She’d brought her shaking fingers up and snapped in one ear, then the other.

And she’d heard the sound, in one ear, but not the other.

And she had realized exactly what that had meant.

She’s lucky she’s in the dark. She’d probably cried most of the dark makeup she’d smeared over her eyelids into wild streaks across her cheeks. Her hair’s loose and wild around her, snarled and knotted, and her suit’s well beyond the point of any sort of repair.

She probably looks wild, like a feral ghost. A part of her wants someone to crawl into her pipe, to find her here, to go white and scream and tell everyone about the wraith in the park. A part of her wants to never see another person again, to crawl past the sewer grate and vanish into some unknowable labyrinth beneath the city, the kind that she’d once believed existed under all cities, that sewer grates and pipes held secret doors to. 

This is a good place, Vanya supposes, or rather, _good enough._ And being a person deeply accustomed to _good enough,_ she resolves to claim it as hers. It suits her, and she suits it, and she can hear anyone coming, and she’ll have a moment to brace herself. And if she dies, she’ll have her burial spot all picked out. If nothing else, she’ll have chosen it herself.

Vanya had tried to lie back in it, to undo her tie and rest her head under the makeshift pillow she’d made of her jacket and rest, but she’s long since given up on the thought of sleeping. Her mind’s alive, her heart’s slamming in her chest, her breaths are quick and sharp and somehow, even with half of her drenched in awful permanent silence, everything is still so _loud._

The pipe catches it all and funnels it down to her; Vanya is at the center of a web of sound, caught in it like an unfortunate insect, no, not an insect but a spider, a foolish spider that’s gone and gotten herself tangled in her own web, and is plucking weakly at the threads, trying to extract herself from her own mess.

 _Yes,_ she thinks, _a web. It’s a web, isn’t it? When I reach out, I am at the center of a web, and each sound I hear pulls at a thread leading to me, and I can make a map of it._

She tries it.

At the far edge of it all, there’s the distant rumble of cars, from the road she’d left behind. Much closer, the soft rush of the river she’d tripped into, that’s responsible for the greenish tint of her pants below the knee, and the way her socks have dried in the impression of her toes. The buzzing chorus of night insects is _everywhere_ , and louder than any rattle of gunfire, with the way they soak into her bones and make them hum, and the whispering of the trees slithers down the pipe to caress her face, the way Vanya’s always imagined a lover might. 

Vanya feels her fingers unwrap from where she’s wrapped them around her knees, and twitch, as though the wind will take her hand, and she feels so very stupid for it. 

She’s trying to reach out and pluck at the threads, to listen for the shape of her name, somewhere among the night noise, but it never comes.

She can’t tell if that intestinal twist in her is relief, or disappointment. It feels like both. It feels like neither. 

There’s the high, musical cackling of a pack of coyotes, ebbing closer. They have her scent, she’s sure. 

Vanya tenses. And waits. 

When she hears wet snuffling from the end of the pipe, she gathers the sound, rolling it back down the inside of the metal cone, and lets it rumble thunderously. Her eyes flare up, luminous and wolfish, and she sits quietly, waiting for the predators to recognize the monster whose territory they have imposed upon. 

There’s a scuffling of pawsteps retreating, and then she is bothered no more, left alone with the dim, moonish, blue-white shine coming from her. 

_They, it seems, know better than my siblings,_ Vanya thinks, lifting a hand and examining its utterly inhuman luminosity. 

Her siblings, who’d brought her here to kill her. 

Her siblings, who kept circling her, so starved for someone to hurt, to diminish until they were tiny. But in the end, it had been they, who were so small before her. They had been the small ones, and compared to them, she had been a _god…_

The thought is empty. It’d been given to her by Leonard, or Harold, or whoever he is. 

( _Leonard,_ she decides quickly, not knowing why she insists so strongly on keeping to the name he’d given himself. Perhaps it’s because she can’t forget what he’d told her, about his father, about his own loneliness. Perhaps it’s because she feels sorry for him, in her own way.)

The thought had been his, but then it had leapt to her like a fire crawls from one house to the next, and she had fed it all the kindling she could, until it had been hers.

The thought is hers, but it isn’t hers, but it is, but it isn’t, but does it matter, really? It cannot do her any good any longer, it had left her sad and so horribly damaged, so she lets it crumble to dust and blow away from her. 

They want to kill her. She knows that, she knows that, she’s so stupid for not knowing that before. 

And she’s so _stupid,_ for not wanting to do the same.

Because she doesn’t, is the thing. She’ll do it, God knows she’ll do it if she has to, but if they leave her be, she’s content to return the favor. 

Vanya sighs, and the sound rumbles along the corrugated metal. 

She thinks back to last night, at the Icarus.

She’d been so sure then, but now, she simply can’t grasp the logic that had possessed her to climb onstage and shake the building. 

_What was I doing,_ she wonders, _no,_ _what was I_ going _to do? What was I going to_ do _to myself?_

And she’s crying. She’s so _quick,_ to cry now. 

Her feelings are so _big_ now. 

Only days ago, she’d been numb, shuffling through life and hardly feeling any of it. The only emotions she’d had left were withered and clinging to life beneath a dense fog of apathy, and now that the fog has cleared, that those long-lost feelings have risen up like long-repressed monsters to the surface, evermore vengeful for having been repressed at all, she feels everything so intensely. She feels as though she’d been rubbed raw, and the wind is constantly whipping over her wounds.

It is this sudden intimacy with her feelings that has made Vanya distinctly aware that she isn’t angry anymore. 

She isn’t, and she doesn’t know why, only that her anger had been carried away on a wave of fear, and even that had gone off towards some distant shore she can’t even imagine, and now she’s bobbing at the surface of a flat sea, staring up at the ink-black sky, wondering when the next wave will be along to sweep her away beneath it.

She feels the way castaways must feel after their ships sink, and they’re all alone in the middle of the ocean, so keenly aware of their own smallness, of how _much_ is beneath her, of how many ancient, unknowable creatures are staring up at her from below, waiting for her to stop kicking. 

In her own case, she supposes, she’d driven her ship onto the rocks all on her own, just to listen to the metal scream as the stone sheared its hull in two. 

She’d done it. She’d proved her power, her superiority, her specialness, and she’d severed those chains tying herself to her family, and made herself alone.

And here she is. She’d gone and done it, and she doesn’t feel any better. 

She simply has no idea what she’s going to do. She’s gone full circle, all the way back around to small and useless, and she’s alone in the muck, without even her violin anymore. She’d dropped it, and it’d been gone when she’d awoken in that alleyway, and she has nothing to comfort herself with, save the sounds of the night. 

… Vanya isn’t sure if she _wants_ to be comforted, if she’s honest. It would be so easy, to be comforted, but it wouldn't be enough. Those monsters would just resurface, ever angrier, the second she lets her guard down.

Strangely, she gets the sense that she needs this pain, this awful cleaving ache at the center of her threatening to split her in two. She _needs_ to feel it.

So Vanya sits alone, lost in time, lost in the world, lost in the dark, lost in the maze deep within herself, and she cries herself empty.

* * *

In the end, the Hargreeves brothers had been permitted to stay the night, provided that they clean Odessa’s nice floors (which they did, with mixed success), and provided that they not sleep in Allison’s room (which they did, with less-mixed success, entirely down to Klaus getting tired of Diego’s snoring, worming his way out from under his arm, and needling his way into Allison’s bed, before being kicked to the floor). 

The next morning, to Diego’s infinite annoyance, they do not hit the ground running.

Rather, the process of leaving Odessa’s is slow. 

Exceedingly slow.

Allison has been holding them up all morning, carefully packing everything, and Diego’s been pacing and poking his head through the doorway of Allison’s room to hiss, “Will you hurry _up?”_ every five minutes. Which, of course, only strengthens Allison’s resolve to pack even slower, just to piss him off. She even takes extra care to pick out which of her dresses she will wear for her departure.

Klaus resolves to help by staying out of the way, so he heads outside, letting the bracing chill of the autumn air jolt him all the way awake. He flicks his sunglasses down over his face, and nods with excessive casualness at Allison’s neighbor, who is sitting on his porch, staring. Klaus raises a hand at him. _Hello._

He receives no reply. 

Klaus nods, a little sheepishly. 

He finds Diego and Luther with the car, parked sloppily halfway up the curb. Diego has his head buried in the front seat, and Luther is cutting finger holes into a pair of leather gloves as he leans against the car, sending the whole front of the vehicle sinking into the pavement. 

He’d been missing all morning, ever since Klaus had peeled his cheek off the floor and gone padding around the house in search of food, but now he’s back and he’s…

“Why are you wearing a suit?”

“Because my clothes are full of bullet holes,” Luther replies. He pauses a moment, mulling a thought over, and decides to speak it, “And besides, it’s the sixties. I want to fit in. I think it’s important, you know?”

Diego, who could care less about looking out of place, rakes his eyes up Luther, looking to him like a child playing dress-up. 

_Does he think we can’t tell what he’s got under that jacket?_

“You’re fooling no one,” Diego sneers.

“Neither are you,” Luther replies coldly.

Klaus astutely gathers that this exchange is about a lot more than just Luther’s fashion choices, and he smartly decides to not poke this proverbial sleeping bear. Ben, who has come to a similar conclusion, reclines on the hood, and peers up at the icy wisps of white cloud overhead, trying to determine what shapes they resemble. He is careful to ignore the soft jingling of the dog tags around Klaus’s neck, as he fiddles with them.

Allison has chosen this moment to drag her suitcase down Odessa’s steps, and to cram it into the trunk, providing Klaus with a wonderful means through which he can diffuse the tension prickling in the air. “Oh, thank _God,_ Allison’s bringing her accessories.”

Allison smacks Klaus’s shoulder, but behind him, Diego’s laughing. 

_Good,_ he thinks, _we can forget about it._

` Essential items,` she writes.

“Nothing more essential than a can of hairspray.”

Allison underlines `essential.`

“Sure. _Sure,”_ Klaus turns, and begins mouthing _essential_ back and forth with Ben.

Allison turns, taking notice of Luther for the first time. She’d handed him a chunk of her money early in the morning, at his request, and now she’s seeing where it had gone.

`You look nice`.

Luther’s ears turn pink. 

“Look, are we done?” Diego asks. “I’d like to get going.”

`1 more thing.`

Everyone groans.

Allison's bright yellow heels click up Odessa’s stoop one last time, and she roots through her purse, quietly cursing her impulsive choice to upend her coffee tin full of savings unceremoniously into it. But at last, she finds what she was looking for: a short stack of letters she’d spent the better part of the night composing, each addressed to the friends and acquaintances she’d made in her month here, each containing a personalized letter to each of them.

Allison’s heart aches, at the thought that she won’t get to formally say goodbye in person. Last night, she’d told Ray and Miles and Jill about the future, about how this movement they’re participating in will change the world, and how it won’t. She’d told them a lot of things, some they believed, some they didn’t, but one thing she’d never thought to tell them was _goodbye._ It had simply slipped her mind, 

She’d known that she _had_ to tell them. Five’s taught her exactly how much damage vanishing into thin air can cause a person, and she’s determined to avoid inflicting that same harm on these friends she’s made here. She hasn’t known them for long, but her leaving will still hurt them. It’s unavoidable, it’s _inevitable,_ but there’s something small she can do to assuage that pain, so she had decided to do it. 

Allison presses her letters gently into Odessa’s hands, and her benefactor gets it.

“I’ll make sure they get these,” she says, and Allison smiles, reaching up with ink-stained hands to tug the old woman in for a quick hug. 

Behind them, Diego leans on the horn.

“Sure you can’t stay?” Allison can feel the woman’s smile curling into her neck.

Allison sputters out a laugh, kissing her quickly on the temple.

Yes, she is sure. She’s never been more sure about anything. This isn’t her time; she may have touched it in some small way, but she is not _of_ it, she does not _belong_ to it in the way that they do. She could stay for years and years, and she'd never truly fit in.

Allison has to go home. She has a family to reunite, and a child to come home to, and a world to save.

She leaps off the stoop, her yellow-striped sundress swirling behind her as she strides down to the car.

She runs her fingers along the bullet holes in the rear of the car-that-is-not-Diego’s-car, the ones she’d practically missed the night before, so tired and distracted by the events of the evening that she’d never thought to wonder about it. 

She turns, a question written across her face.

“Later,” Diego grumbles, slapping the side of the car with his palm, and she frowns. 

She glances down, a little further, at the rear bumper, and blinks.

There’s an odd little indentation, like a small, long-fingered hand had reached out and clawed it, as crisp as though the bumper weren’t made of metal, but of wet clay.

Allison stares at it for a moment, then shakes it off. She’s letting her imagination get away from her; she’d lost a lot of sleep writing those letters. 

She climbs into the backseat, beside Luther, and tugs her skirt in after her, careful to keep it from getting caught in the door.

And they’re on their way.

They stop off at Minnie’s Bar-B-Q, an outdoor place Allison assures them she’s made a habit of frequenting. Luther reserves them a picnic table at the very end, as close to the car as they can get, in case they need to make a sudden exit. Diego makes harsh eye contact with a group of diners who are staring at them, to establish dominance. And Allison makes a horrific mistake in handing Klaus money, and sending him to order for them.

She realizes what she’s done the second Klaus leaves the table, and she watches tensely as he orders, turning his head over his shoulder to nod at what Allison sincerely hopes is Ben, and does not deflate until he’s back at the table, with something for everybody.

And something that absolutely none of them had asked for.

Allison frowns, pointing at the extra set of wings, and Klaus blinks. “Oh. Right. Here.”

He draws in a quick breath, nods to himself, and conjures his brother, sitting right on the splintered edge of the picnic bench at his side. 

It’s a little like a muscle, he thinks. He just needs to keep working on it, and it’ll get easier and easier.

… Of course, that raises the question of what will happen if he tears it, which he decides not to entertain. 

It’s easier to watch his brothers gape. Despite having seen him do it twice already, they’re still awestruck, and it’s very, very balming to Klaus’s ego.

“Wow,” Diego says.

“That’s… gonna take some getting used to,” mumbles Luther.

“Yeah, so, those are mine,” Ben points to his wings. “Me and Klaus have this thing, where, like… You know what, that doesn’t really matter.”

“Wait… can you _eat?”_

They experiment, and to Ben’s infinite disappointment, he can’t. 

He slides the wings across the table to Luther, who nods in thanks. 

Diego nudges Allison with his shoulder, and she follows his gaze.

They're still being watched, and Allison gets why: they make for a strange group, even if one of them weren't blue and luminous and partially see-through. They're going to draw eyes no matter where they go.

In 2019, Allison might've been flattered by the attention. 

Here, she feels keenly aware of how rough her voice feels, of the tattoo peeking out from under the sleeve of her cream-colored cardigan, of the shapes of her brother's bodies beside her, of the way her heels pinch her toes, and how quickly she'll have to kick them off if she needs to run or fight.

In the past, Allison has felt like she's on a mission, all the time. That she's undercover, costuming herself as a woman of her time, constantly looking over her shoulder for someone who might realize exactly what she is. Or, given exactly _where_ she is, that she might be attacked for an entirely different reason, that her first night in the city might repeat itself.

Even though she's among her family, that sense of unease hasn't left her. Now, if anything, she feels like her location's been broadcast for all to know, no matter their intention, and she simply cannot relax, even here, even among people who just a few days ago, she'd eaten beside in peace. 

`Car?` she writes.

"Now?"

She nods.

And they go, all rising together and moving as a pack, falling seamlessly back into the patterns they'd favored as children when they were dropped in uniform into strange territory. 

Once they're back in the insulated, internal world of the car, and they've regained their anonymity, the conversation turns, inevitably, to the nuclear-sized stormcloud hanging over them all: Vanya.

They had agreed, in the moments before the world had withered to dust, that they would save her. That they would fall in around her and find a way to fix what had broken in her and sent her skidding down that slippery slope that had ended in the apocalypse. Each and every one of them remembers that promise, and each and every one of them is determined to keep to it.

However, each and every one of them has a very different idea as to how to go about rehabilitating their wayward sister. This has been complicated considerably by the events of the previous night, fresh and stinging in their memory, and in the fresh scrapes each of them bears. 

“This would be a lot easier with Five,” Klaus sighs. “Where the _hell_ is he, anyway?”

"Maybe he's not here yet," wonders Ben, "And all the same, I think we should focus on Vanya. Five'll be fine. You saw her last night; you know she won't be."

His siblings nod. 

"I don’t see,” Diego is saying, “How we’re possibly going to be able to approach her, if she’s going to turn around and run in the other direction. Especially if she decides to just blow up a street to get us away from her. You remember what she did to us at the theater, right?”

He grimaces, remembering the icy hand of energy, wrapped around his heart and squeezing.

`She’s scared,`writes Allison.

“Well, why would she be scared?” asks Ben. “She knows us, she knows we’re trying to help her.”

A sheepish silence descends on them, as Allison sends a withering glare at each and every one of her brothers.

`Idiots`. 

She’s referring, of course, to that night at the Icarus, so fresh in all of their minds, when they'd gone through with the decision to kill her. 

“We were panicked,” Luther says, turning red. 

It’s true, of course. As far as Luther and Diego and Klaus had known, the world was about to end, and they had only a scant few minutes to save it. Such pressing time limits tend not to yield inspired solutions.

“Well, that’s no excuse,” says Ben.

“You’re telling me,” Klaus says, “That if you’d been able to, you _wouldn’t_ have been charging her with the rest of us?”

Ben swallows.

“See, that’s what I thought.” 

“We need a plan--” begins Luther.

“--No,” protests Diego, “We need to get a _move_ on. Seeing as Allison just wasted half our day--”

Allison scowls.

“--We need to move fast to compensate. Seeing as she’s liable to blow up half a city block, don’t you think that means we need to track her down as soon as possible? Before anyone else gets hurt? Before she blows up the world a couple decades early?”

"And how do you propose we do that?" Ben asks, sputtering and fading. 

In his wake, the car explodes in raucous argument. The warmth of reunion has faded away, and the bonding spell the fear of being harmed instills in them has broken, now that they are alone again. Left to their own devices, the Hargreeves siblings fall into old habits, and begin bickering viciously, each eager to offset blame for their failure onto the next.

* * *

“Fine,” Five had said, his gut churning in hate, though whether it was directed outwards or at himself, he could not say. “I’ll do it.”

And then, just like that, he was unshackled, and free to move at will. 

He has a briefing to attend, and he’s on his way to it now, the folders tucked under his arm.

Five navigates the halls of the Home Office, and decides to take the scenic route. Something to give him a little extra time, to gather his thoughts, before he’s back in the muck.

He has to do this, is the thing. He _has_ to. It’s one thing, to refuse on a moral standard, and then be obliterated from time itself. It’s quite another, to damn someone else to oblivion. 

He can’t do it. He _won’t_ do it.

So here he is. Right back where he’d started, with that same collar digging into his neck, and now he can’t take it off without risking the death of his littermate. 

Five hates it. He _hates_ it. He’s practically foaming at the mouth.

But to be considered so severe a threat to the timeline that the Commission would rather conspire to wipe him from time itself, and thus have to go through the work of restructuring the timeline beyond 1989, than allow him to continue to exist in any form?

… Well. Five would be lying if he said he wasn’t a _little_ flattered.

There’s a mirror, in the corner of the hall he’s passing through, and Five stops dead in his tracks.

He’d felt something different in him, the moment he’d landed in that alleyway. But there hadn’t been enough time to think about it, to even acknowledge that feeling of discomfort was there. And then again, in the office that had once been the Handler’s, he’d heard it in the creak of his voice, and he’d felt it, in the way the arms of his blazer crept past his wrist bones and his feet feel cramped in their shoes, but now he _sees_ it.

He’s _older._

His face is sharper, and his voice is deeper, and he’s a few inches taller, and he’s _older._

Somehow, in the process of time traveling, Five had lost hold of his age again. He’s still a teenager, _god fucking dammit,_ and Five can’t put his finger on exactly what year his body’d leapt out of the timestream as, but it’s definitively _not-_ thirteen. He seems to be skipping through age like a stone across a still pond. 

_Will I be twenty, when I come out of time-traveling again?_ Five wonders. _Thirty? Forty? Suppose I jump as far ahead as ninety._

He sighs, running his hand through his hair.

_Look, as long as I’m a step closer to being done with puberty, fine by me._

And he carries on. He has a mission to complete. Far be it from him to obsess over anything else right now, when there’s a proverbial bomb strapped to his sibling’s chest.

Five’s made it to the section of the Home Office that had adjoined the tuberoom, where he can see the results of his implosion streaked across the walls. The entire hall’s been taped off with neon yellow stripes of caution tape, and Five pauses for a moment, to peer in and take note of the damage.

From what Five has gathered, he hadn’t just destroyed the tuberoom and the briefcase room in his grand departure. Evidently, the asbestos packed into the building’s walls had ignited beautifully in the minutes after his escape to 2019, and a third of the building was lost in the ensuing conflagration.

 _Oops,_ Five thinks with a sneer, reaching out to brush the blackened brick with the tips of his fingers. 

Then he’s on his way again, shouldering his way through a hall packed with Corrections Agents. 

Each and every one of them, he’s been told, had been summoned back from the field, to return their briefcases to the Home Office for inventory, and the hall’s so thick with them that he could practically walk across their heads and shoulders and make it to the other side without dropping down to the floor once.

Each and every one of them is pacing the halls, or sitting in a chair in a waiting room, tapping a dent in the floor with an anxious foot, or leaning against a wall, chewing their lip bloody. They’re all so desperate to get back to the field, to shave more time off their five-year contract.

The contract. 

Five feels his skin crawl at the memory of it. He remembers the first time he’d realized exactly what he’d agreed to, the sheer deluge of dread that had washed over him. 

It’s a trap, you see. They lure you in with the promise of escape, in return for five years of service, but no one ever makes it to the end of those five years. No one that Five’s heard of has ever successfully retired to the time of their choosing, or collected on that pension.

You give five years, alright, but here’s the catch: You don’t give five calendar years, but five years of continuous work, starting at the time of commencement; every hour you’re on the job counts, but not a single one _outside_ of it. You sleep, and the clock stops. You’re between assignments, and the clock stops. You stop to eat or shower or take a piss, and the clock stops. And those little trackers in your arm know, in the strangely specific way that Commission technology knows, exactly when you’re on the job, and exactly when you’re not. 

Five, in causing the briefcase shortage, had singlehandedly held each and every agent’s contract up. 

Needless to say, he keeps his mouth shut and his head down, until he’s made it to the briefing room listed on the file. 

The room, used for orientations, safety demonstrations, and briefings, is crowded with desks. They’re similar to the ones that had once filled the Academy’s few classrooms, but while there had only ever been seven of them, here, the room’s packed wall to wall with them.

“Do I really have to do this?” Five sighs, and the woman hunched over the projector at the front of the room peers at him through her narrow glasses. “You know who I am, right? You know I get how this works, right?”

“Yes, yes, and yes. It’s protocol.”

“Great.” Five slouches behind a desk, sticking his legs out far and digging his heels into the linoleum. Maybe if she walks his way, he’ll be able to trip her.

Five peers at the presentation, watching the title card for Mission 02-640-XOB blur into place. He peeks down at his folder. Yep, same one. Great. 

“The target: the thirty-fifth President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Five yawns.

“And why must this mission be completed?”

Five’s silent.

She stares at him.

“It simply must be done,” Five replies flatly, reading off a faded propaganda poster hanging crookedly in the corner. 

She tuts, but continues. “Your most formidable obstacle in the operation? This man.”

The slide shifts to the particularly washed-out photo of his older-younger self that had been taken shortly after his orientation and uniform fitting, however long ago that had been.

_God, how long was I even here?_

All the days are running together, and Five _can’t..._

“Rogue Agent Number Five. An extremely dangerous subject with full physical augmentation, a one-hundred-percent success rate, made even more volatile by heavy experimentation with C.I.A truth serums and high-grade hallucinogens.”

Oh yeah. He remembers _that._ He’d been hit with a dose heavy enough to make an elephant see the lost city of Atlantis.

He’s glad that he’s in his young body again, when he thinks about it that way. All those things that’d been done to them have been relegated to memory. Maybe, with enough time, he can forget it, or it’ll fade so much it’ll feel like nothing more than a bad dream.

“... his operation will take place one day after insertion, at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. The current strategy suggests a full-on assault on Number Five, who will be taking position on the Grassy Knoll. His plan is to abandon mission and make an unauthorized jump to the year 2019--”

“Yes, yes, I _know_ all that,” Five sighs. “I was _there.”_

“... The president must be corrected at all costs...” she’s saying, and Five zones out again. 

He knows what’ll happen next; he’s been given clearance to assemble the team of his choice to complete this mission, and to choose the insertion date and location, and he’d already submitted the necessary information for approval, which he had gained.

Instead of listening to it all parroted back to him, Five thinks of his family.

They’d fallen away from him in the timestream, so they could be scattered anywhere or anywhen. But once he’s thought his way out of this Gordian knot he’s found himself tangled in, he’ll have to start somewhere, so he makes his plan now: He’ll return to that alleyway, and he’ll see if they’d landed there, if they’d been scattered temporally, rather than physically. He'll start his search there, and he'll bring the family back together again, and they'll save Vanya, and they'll save the world. 

Five peels back the page of typewritten information; the details on when and where in Dallas he’ll need to teleport to be reunited with the people he’ll need to pull off this mission. He looks instead at the image in the folder, the face of his twin, and he wants to throw back his head and laugh.

Five has a _twin._

Five doesn’t care much about blood ties. They have their value, he’s sure, but he was raised totally divorced from them. It isn’t the thought that he’s biologically related to one of his siblings that has him so awestruck. It’s the thought that, though he and each and every one of his siblings had been spontaneously spat out of the void, he hadn’t emerged in the world alone. Someone had been with him from the start, someone had been by his side, all that time.

There’s a warm, soft cloud of emotion skimming along the underside of his chest at the thought of it. Five doesn’t recognize the feeling; he’s never felt it before. 

_One last job,_ he thinks wearily, wanting to scream, wanting to scratch at his neck until it bleeds.

He’ll figure something out. He knows there has to be a way out… _somewhere._

There has to be. There _has_ to be.

* * *

Evening rises, and the Moon peers down on the Hargreeves siblings coldly.

They’ve been seesawing back and forth for hours between bickering and simmering in prickly silence, and there’s only so long they can stand each other in the throes of a disagreement this deep.

The sun is down, and their brother is nowhere to be found; they’d gone to the alley where they’d appeared, and waited for hours, but he still hadn’t appeared, and now, they’ve come to realize that this is something they’re going to have to handle themselves. Their sister is loose, and her trail is running cold, and they need to figure this out. 

Now, gathered around the car that isn’t theirs, they’re snapping and snarling at each other like a pack of quarrelsome wolves, and they’re about to reach their breaking point. 

`We need to talk to her,` Allison insists, for the tenth time in as many hours. 

“Yeah, you know, she sure did show how willing she is to listen,” Klaus snipes, “You know, when she buried us under a mountain of brick? For the _second_ time? Frankly, I’m not looking forward to the third time being a charm on this one.” 

Allison smacks his shoulder with her notepad. 

“Oh, _real_ classy.”

`Have a better idea?`

“No, not really,” Klaus says truthfully, “In fact, I don’t really care that much. Whatever you guys decide, sure, we’ll do that. I guess. But I’d like to do this in a way that maximizes my chances of walking away from this with my head on my shoulders, and that’s clearly not gonna be it. See?” He gestures to their brothers. “They agree with me.”

Allison turns, and regards them.

Luther and Diego have a tense, guilty twist to their faces, but they’re nodding.

"If she won't listen, there's not much we can do," Luther says.

She shakes her head, charging around to the other side of the car, waving her notebook furiously.

“Hey,” Ben chirps over Klaus’s shoulder, “Hey, can you conjure me?”

He considers it for a moment.

“No,” Klaus sighs, “Sorry, I’m just… I don’t know if I can do it again.”

Ben stares at him, long and hard. “You don’t know, or you don’t want to?”

Klaus feels his heart drop. Sometimes, he really does hate Ben.

“I just… I’m _tired,_ okay?”

 _“Are_ you? Or do you just not like what I’m going to say?”

Klaus looks away, feeds his investment into watching Luther and Diego snarl at each other like a pair of dogs fighting for the biggest bone.

Diego’s climbed into the car, and Luther has his hand wrapped so tightly around the driver’s-side door that he can see the metal twisting in his grip.

“I’m saying,” Diego’s snarling, “That we need to find her, as fast as possible. Every second we spend arguing is a second she’s spending on her own, and we can’t leave her out there; no one’s safe that way. We need to go back and get her, and get her to come with us.”

“Vanya’s not going to like that,” Luther protests. “She’s not just going to _come back;_ did you _see_ how angry she was?”

“Well, then we _make_ her. We drag her back kicking and screaming if we have to.”

 _“How,_ Diego? Did you forget last night? There’s no way we can make her come back with us. She doesn’t trust us!”

“And who’s fault is that? Huh?”

“Just as much yours as it is mine. You walked away, you and Klaus. You could’ve let her out, but you didn’t. And at the Icarus, you were both right next to me. I fucked up, when I locked her up, alright? I’m owning that, right now. I fucked up. But you fucked up too.”

Diego laughs caustically. “And what do you think? Tell the class, what does King Kong think we should do?”

Allison huffs behind him. He ignores her.

“I think,” Luther says, “We should go get Dad.”

Klaus and Diego erupt in acidic laughter. Ben too, not that anyone can hear him but Klaus.

“Hear me out!” Luther’s shouting over Klaus and Diego, “Hear me out!”

Diego rolls his eyes, and Klaus says, “Oh, _sure.”_

Allison crosses her arms, and nods.

“He’s here, right, in ‘63? Dad's alive, and he has the house by now, so that’s where he’d be, right? Well, I think that we should go to him, and tell him everything that’s happened.”

“You think that’ll help how?” asks Klaus.

“I think that if Dad knows what happened, if he knows that the Academy falls apart, and fails, and that the world ends because he hid Vanya’s powers, that he’ll change.”

Allison coughs up a laugh.

“I mean, _think_ about it, Dad created the Umbrella Academy to save the world, right? Well, if we tell him how to do it, why _wouldn’t_ he? And if he changes how he treats us, wouldn’t that mean the world would be safe, and we’d be home in 2019?”

`You want to change the timeline`, Allison realizes.

“It’s the clearest path,” Luther insists, “See, it accounts for everything. We don’t have to worry about Five not being here, or about finding Vanya, or about finding a way home, because if it works, we’ll _be_ home. And Five won’t have left, and Ben’ll be alive, and Vanya will be okay.”

Ben leans forward. “I could _live,”_ he realizes. 

No one can hear him but Klaus, who isn’t listening, who’s too busy frowning doubtfully, contemplating the plan.

Doubt hangs heavy over them all, and it curdles, turning to anger in Diego’s gut. 

_Really?_ He thinks, _you’re really back on this bullshit again?_

“God, Luther,” Diego shakes his head. “You’re so damn lost in it, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?” 

“That whole plan of yours is a _fantasy._ It’s a pipe dream. You go up to the city and you talk to Dad, and _nothing’s gonna change._ Why don’t you _see_ that? Are you really that naive, or are you just _stupid?”_

Luther flinches.

“I’m not… Look. Dad isn’t a good man, alright? I know that. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, and God knows I’ve been punished for it, but _I know.”_

“Then you should _know_ that it doesn’t matter what you’ll tell him. Nothing’s gonna change.”

“You’re wrong,” Luther bristles, “Dad’s not a good man, but he’s a strategist. He plans things out. He’s logical, and if we just give him the facts, he’ll read them for what they are, and he’ll do what it takes to fix it.”

Klaus laughs once, high and crowish.

Diego shakes his head. _You really are just an idiot, aren’t you?_

“It’s a _good_ plan.” Luther’s turned to Klaus and Allison now, he’s reaching out to them, “It’s a simple plan. It’ll _work,_ I know it will.”

They don’t look too enthused.

And here it is, Diego realizes. Here’s the moment he’s been waiting for his entire life, the moment that Luther utterly fails, that the smoke’s blown away and the family sees him for exactly what he is. 

It's shitty of him, he knows, vaguely, to be doing this now. But the thing is, this is something Diego's wanted for a long, long time. He's wanted to lead the Academy since before he remembers wanting anything at all. He's wanted to be at the head of the pack since his father had first trapped him in second place, and he's finally, finally _here._

Here it is. Here’s his moment to step up, to be the leader he’s always known he was, to take his rightful place, the place that's been owed to him. He just has to help them realize who they’re following.

“Oh, look at _you,_ Number One.” 

Luther draws in a sharp breath from his nose, and Diego sneers. 

_See how easy it is, riling him up? You idiots really want him in charge?_

“You’re still obsessed with him, aren’t you, Luther? After everything, the _first_ thing you do is go running back to Daddy. And if that’s not bad enough, you wanna drag us all along on your ego trip? You want to leave our sister here and go crawling home to get your belly scratched?”

Luther’s turning red, his face twisted up in rage.

“Why don’t you admit it, huh?” Diego pushes, “This has nothing to do with helping Vanya, or getting us all home. It’s all about _you,_ and how _weak_ you are.”

Luther’s temper gets away from him, just for a second.

There’s a white-hot burst of fury in his brain, and there’s a fist-shaped indentation in the hood of the car, and he’s heaving long, heavy breaths, staring at it, realizing what he’d done, what he _could’ve_ done, if he’d punched just a foot to the right, where Diego’s blanched face is hovering, staring at the dent.

He looks up, to the other side of the car, to Allison. She’s staring at him with her lips drawn tightly together, shaking her head.

“You all know it,” Diego says, turning to his other siblings. “You know it won’t work. You know we can’t reason with him. You know all Luther wants is to make this about himself.”

Allison scowls at him, but he ignores her, juddering the engine to life.

“Hey!” Luther snaps. 

“What?”

“I need the car. I need it to go get Dad.”

“Take the bus,” Diego snaps. “It’s not like anyone’s coming with you.”

Luther blinks.

He looks up, and around. 

“That’s not…” The words die in his throat.

Allison and Klaus are silent, staring at the roof of the car, then slowly looking up and across it to glance at each other, quietly reaching the same decision.

“Look,” Klaus says, holding up an apologetic hand, “Dad’s not gonna listen.” 

`We need to find her,` Allison insists. 

And then, Klaus is tugging the backseat door open, and climbing in.

“Hey,” Ben is saying hurriedly. “Hey, wait. Klaus, what are you doing? _Get out,_ we need to stay.”

Klaus takes a quick breath, and then tears his eyes away from Ben, coughing.

 _“Klaus?_ Klaus, conjure me _right now._ I have to talk, I have to talk to everyone. _Please,_ help me speak. _Let_ me speak.”

Klaus shakes his head, just a bit, crossing his arms.

“Klaus, what the _hell?”_ Ben shouts, but there’s no one listening.

Allison hurries around the side of the car, digging through her purse and producing a crumpled ball of bills. She smooths them out, counts them carefully, makes sure there’ll be more than he’ll need, and tucks it into Luther’s pocket.

He recognizes it immediately as bus fare, and he sighs, bowing his head.

Allison takes his hand into hers, and Luther squeezes her hand gently, feeling the soft spaces between her fingers.

She has his chin in her hand, and is guiding his gaze to hers.

He obeys.

Allison looks at him, long and hard and deeply sad, and rises up on her toes, to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. His heart skips a beat.

 _Be safe,_ she mouths.

"You too," he murmurs.

She squeezes his hand one last time, and then slowly tugs her fingers away.

Then, she’s sliding into the backseat, and the door closes with a final-sounding _clunk._

Luther stares down at Diego, choking on all the words he can’t think to work into a sentence. Diego looks up at him, tense and resolute.

And Luther lets go of the driver’s-side door, leaving behind the imprint of his fingers.

Diego stares at it, then grits his teeth, and puts the car in drive.

Three pairs of eyes watch him morosely from the backseat as the car rolls away, two he can see, one he can’t but nonetheless knows is there. 

It takes forever, for the car to reach the end of the street, and turn away. And for as long as forever lasts, Luther watches the car shrink and shrink, and the faces inside turn to pinpricks of color. He watches the schism between them widen, and widen, and widen, until it’s swallowed them as they pass under the long, inky shadow of a building and do not emerge again.

Then, they’re gone. 

And Luther is alone with the Moon.

* * *

Vanya had fallen asleep, sometime after watery sunlight had crept down the muddy path to her lair, so tired that even the bone-deep discomfort she’d been languishing in wasn’t enough to keep her head from hitting the leaf litter and her mind from drifting away. 

She wakes, again and again throughout the day, but she would do so with no desire to lift herself up. All of Vanya’s thoughts have gone wispy and intangible, like clouds, and they kept slipping from her fingers whenever she’d try to reach for them. Her hunger has caught up to her, lapping unsteadily at her head like water, and for a long while, she’s content to drift.

But then it starts gnawing at her gut, and turns malignant, so she crawls skittishly out of her den, into the red-streaked dusk, and goes rooting through a row of trash cans that is as close to her park as she can find. 

The food she finds is predictably disgusting, gray-streaked with mold that she picks around, or else scraps of leftovers that’d been discarded for one reason or another. But Vanya’s in no position to turn her nose up, so instead, she holds it, and guzzles down what she’d scavenged. The idea is, that if she’ll only eat fast enough, she won’t be put off by the taste.

It doesn’t work. 

Vanya gags on her first bite, and her second, and her third, but she shudders her way through it, and is back in her hiding hole by the time the top of the sun has grazed the horizon.

She sits in the mouth of her mediocre little cave, and stares at her suit, now stained in shades of gray and brown and green. Her hair’s so muddy that she can almost pretend that it’s still brown, and not this odd shade of gray-white that it’d been bleached by her power. 

She sits, and watches the shadows grow long and narrow, and feels the invasive chill of night wrap around her shoulders, and she goes back, to that place deep within herself where she’d gone wandering the night before. 

She’s glad she’d done it, that she’d spent the night sobbing and miserable. The odd thing is, she’s never felt realer in her life because of it. Vanya feels as though there are spaces opening up inside of her, unlocked by that pain, and she’s realizing that the vast darkness she’d been so lost in is massive, but it is nonetheless shapely and complex.

It’s as though she’s been lost down there so long that her eyes have adjusted, and she’s finally able to see that it’s not an abyss at all anymore, but a maze. Perhaps it’d transformed into one, perhaps it's always been that way and she’d never had the eyes to see it until now, but she is here nonetheless, lost in the middle of a maze in her head, one with walls that are ever-shifting. 

Vanya decides that she’s going to start searching for a way out of it, and she isn’t afraid at all, that she has no map to guide herself by, or string to mark her path, or sword to guard herself with. The only monster in this maze is her.

So she climbs to her feet, and stumbles down towards the river she’d skidded into last night, leaving her jacket hanging like a flag of surrender, draped over a bush in front of her shelter. She has only so much time, until her family finds her, and she must have a better grip on her powers for when they do.

For whatever she ends up doing.

 _Water is good,_ she remembers from her training with Leonard, somehow only a few days ago and also a thousand years away at the same time. _I can see the ripples better that way. It didn’t help before, but it might work now._

Vanya unbuttons the rest of her shirt, standing at the bank, one-shoed and peering out at the way the bleeding sky has dyed the river deep scarlet, at the strange warped shape of her own reflection, peering back at her. 

She screws her eyes shut, throws out her senses, and sits at the center of her web, searching for a sound.

And she finds them: the backfiring of a car in the distance, the buzzing of a mallard in the water nearby, the familiar distant drone of traffic, the chattering of a raccoon somewhere in the bushes, the soft shuffling of footsteps of hikers nearby _(how strange I must look to them,_ she thinks).

Vanya chooses the soft lapping of the water itself, scooping it up and using herself as a conduit, pulling the slosh of water against the bank upwards and starting a ripple that she hopes will roll smoothly across the width of the river. She doesn’t have her violin, but maybe her body can be the instrument, and her mind the bow--

That’s as far as she gets.

Vanya’s so engrossed in the languid liquid sound of the river below her feet that she neglects the sound of the people nearby her, who hadn’t been hikers at all.

Here’s the thing: When a mysterious explosion tears up a significant portion of a street within the city limits, the authorities take notice, even if it seems at the time that a burst pipe is to blame for the devastation. Especially when a second, smaller explosion is reported blocks away, only hours later, and when a strange woman in white, in the center of both incidents and fleeing fast, is the common thread connecting those events. 

And here’s the thing: Dallas is due to host the President in a week. 

Naturally, there’s been an increase in security. Naturally, people will take particular interest in those strange explosions, occurring so very close to the time and place the President is due to be, especially at the height of the Cold War. And naturally, they will take careful note of that strange woman.

Said people, of course, being the FBI.

And said people, of course, having the resources to track such a woman down to where she's hiding in Trinity Park, have found her at last.

Vanya doesn't have much time at all to react; had she, she'd have certainly torn her assailants in two with an arc of vicious energy.

But she doesn't.

There's only a split-second explosion of pain in the back of her skull, and then there's nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Five's arc here is borrowing a LOT from the comics. Not completely, but a lot.
> 
> (Also, tbh I'm NEVER gonna be pleased with this chapter, so I'm just gonna cut myself off, slap it up here, and hope for the best.)


	3. the sound of my own drum

Diego had a grand vision of how this night was going to go: They’d pull up to the mountain of brick they’d tunneled out of yesterday, and there they would find Vanya, perched atop of it like a sphynx, staring down at them. She’d have settled down in their absence, seen the error of her ways, and decided it was time to bury the hatchet. She’d be illuminated by the harsh artificial glow of a streetlamp, and she’d nod at them beatifically, expectantly, having waited to be found, to be found by _him._

And, well. She isn’t there. 

Diego, Allison, and Klaus (and probably Ben, though Klaus has been rather evasive on that front) have driven back to the only lead they had, the half-destroyed street they’d encountered Vanya on, and they’ve gone sifting through the rubble, and she isn’t there.

She isn’t atop the pyramid of rubble, nor buried beneath it, nor anywhere on the block that they can find. Not that the search is very thorough, of course, it being the middle of the night and everything being boarded up, and ordinarily, Diego wouldn’t let that stop him, but there are consequences to being caught here that are a lot more severe, and he isn’t sure how ready he is to deal with them yet.

Diego blames a lot of things.

For one, Diego is an accomplished tracker, but he’s always had the advantage of knowing the city he was searching well enough to hunt in the dark of the night, an advantage he does not have in Dallas in 1963. 

For another, he works alone. He’s best when he’s untethered, when he’s set loose and able to move swiftly and silently at his own pace. He isn’t used to having a trail of hangers-on, constantly pawing him, asking where to go or what to do, or shoving a notebook in his face with insistences that are only half-relevant to his plans, which he keeps to himself, to guard against the possibility of any holes being torn into them. 

Of course they don’t find her. Of course they don’t.

Of course Allison and Klaus give up and trail back to the car with their tails between their legs. 

And of course he has to follow them, of course he has to indulge them when Allison insists they stop for the night, of course he has to let her direct them to a neighborhood where it’ll be safe for him and her to sleep in the car. Of course, he has to listen to Klaus prattle on about some friend he has in Fort Worth, who has a house he's so sure they'll be allowed to stay at.

That’s what leaders do, see. They make sacrifices. See? He knows what he’s doing, doesn’t he? He knows how this works. 

He’s awake for hours, staring at the ceiling of the car, turning the rabbit’s paw over and over in his fingers, thinking about it. He’s finally _here,_ he’s spent his life chasing this role, he’d sacrificed so much time chasing after Luther and now he’s finally caught the white whale and Dad’s _wrong,_ don’t you see? He _did_ it, he’s leading the family, and he’s _ready, dammit,_ it’s just that the rest of the world _isn’t._

He doesn’t have an answer for it, no, that’s not right: It’s them that are the problem. They’re still all caught up in Luther.

 _That’s fine,_ he thinks. _They’ll come around soon._

They sleep fitfully, waking in a chorus of groans, stretching strained limbs that’d been crushed at awkward angles. It’s like they’re fifteen, and stuck on another miserable stakeout. Diego always really hated those, always found them so pointless; why sit and wait when they could just run in and _get it done?_

Diego stares at the bright sun-scoured street, already bustling with people, and grimaces. They’ve overslept, they’ll have a late start, dammit, why didn’t anyone stay awake to keep watch?

“Crap,” he growls, and his neck pops in protest of how he’d been slumped over in the drivers’ seat all night long. His shoulders ache in a familiar way, and he knows for certain that there are going to be angry red indentations carved into his shoulders and back, the ones that always find their way there when he makes the mistake of sleeping in his harness. 

Behind him, Allison’s stretching languidly in the backseat, like a cat awakening from a long afternoon nap. A wisp of curling hair is stuck to her mouth, and she spits it out in disgust, before digging through her purse for a comb and her hairspray.

She climbs out, leaning into the side-view mirror, and promptly suffocates Klaus with the noxious cloud of Aqua Net she sets loose as she begins painstakingly trying to recreate her beehive, with mediocre success.

“God, Allison, you sure you want to get that hole in the ozone layer started _this_ early?”

She ignores him, and he rolls up the window. 

Klaus smears the last of the days-old kohl off his eyelids, and smacks his dry lips. He reaches down reflexively onto the seat, and frowns. 

“It’s _so_ weird,” says Klaus, “There not being any seatbelts in this thing, I mean.”

Diego dispassionately hums in agreement.

“The sixties,” he continues, filling the car with noise so it won’t be so damn quiet, “Strange time.” 

Ben’s quiet. He’s been in one of his moods all night, and it’s hung over him like a shadow into the morning, or is it technically closer to afternoon now. 

_Jeez,_ Klaus wants to say, a nasty feeling gnawing at his gut. _Build a bridge and get over it, man, we’re not going to waste our time on a shitty bus ride with Luther to the world’s worst field trip. I’m the one in the driver’s seat here, not you._

But he holds his tongue. 

Diego climbs out, and something in his back pops as he begins pacing the alley they’d parked in, venturing out to peek into the street, to check for anyone who’d taken notice of them. 

There’s no one so far, but the hair’s still standing on the back of his neck, and he knows from years of missions and years more of individual vigilante work that he should trust that unease, so he decides to keep scouring. 

Ben, not that anyone can see him but Klaus, slides through the front of the car and pads out to imitate Diego. 

Klaus tugs open the glovebox and begins rooting through the detritus left behind by the car’s previous owner: tattered maps, wrappers, crumpled balls of paper with nothing interesting written on them, a few loose cigarettes, one of which he slides behind his ear for future use.

And a tin of what he’s going to guess are nerve pills.

Klaus takes the tin into his hands, turning it over and shaking it automatically. There’s a high, metallic rattling inside.

Klaus’s mouth feels very, very dry all of a sudden.

He traces the edge of the lid, thinking what he’s about to do over very carefully.

His eyes flick up. Allison’s digging through her purse. Diego is fiddling with his harness, buttoning up his shirt to hide it. Ben is coming back, but he’s far enough away to not be able to see what he’s doing. No one’s looking at him.

Then, he quickly pockets it. 

He’s not going to take them. He’s _not,_ really. He just likes having an option. There are ghosts, mixed in with the crowd, some blurred at the edges, some so distinct and real-looking that he has to really look to see the wounds or the way their eyes glow like molten coins. They haven’t noticed him yet, but it’ll be soon, and he needs to know he has an escape route, especially now that Ben’s so very done with him.

Everyone’s in the car, and they’re driving back to the rubble. 

And Allison is getting on Diego’s nerves. She won’t stop challenging him. 

She keeps waving her notepad around, sticking it over his shoulder, having Klaus read, “What’s the plan?” over and over, and God, doesn’t she _get_ it? They don’t _need_ to worry about it. He’s got it. He’s the leader now, and they should trust him. 

Allison of all people should get that; she’s always been a loyal supporter of Luther’s. Diego doesn’t get why she isn’t following suit for him, and he’s having trouble keeping the scowl from creeping over his face.

They’re here.

Diego pulls off to the side of the road, killing the engine, and turning in his seat so he can get a better look at the both of them. 

How does he go about this, how’d Luther always… oh yeah. The pep talks. 

He’d always found them more than a little bit cheesy, had always preferred to just go in and get their missions over with, but as much as he hates to admit it, they’d done their part, in pulling the team together and reminding them of the task at hand.

Fine. He’ll try it. 

“Alright,” he says. “Listen, I think we need to clear some things up.”

Behind him, his siblings straighten.

“You know what the problem is? We’ve been obsessed with our numbers for so _long,_ and now Dad’s dead, and we’re _free_ of all that bullshit, but none of us even realize it. So I want us all to promise each other, right now: No more Two and Three and Four and… Six? Is Ben here?”

Klaus nods.

“And Six. There’s no more Umbrella Academy. That’s over. That’s done with. We’re…” Diego pauses, mulling it over, and then, oh, he’s _got_ it: “We’re Team Zero now.”

Klaus snorts, Allison rolls her eyes, and Diego is suddenly very grateful that he cannot see Ben.

(Ben, for the record, is telling Klaus, “I told you we should have stuck with Luther.”)

“So, Fearless Leader,” drawls Klaus. “What _exactly_ is the plan here?”

“Well, I figure we do the same as yesterday. We head out, we take a look at the mess, and now that it’s daylight, we should be able to track her, or, if all else fails, get a better sense of where she’d go. I mean, she’s on foot, right? She can’t be far.”

“Well… we _know_ all that. What about when we _find_ her?”

“When we find her, we…” Diego bristles. 

Allison flips through her notebook, and produces the often-brandished `talk to her.`

“Sure,” he says flippantly. “Sure, we’ll try that. But say she _won’t listen,_ Allison, what then? Have you thought that far?”

Allison blinks. She opens her mouth, then closes it. 

“Yeah, uh… _what then?”_

It takes Diego a minute to realize that Klaus is asking _him_ that.

And he thinks: _what then? What if Vanya doesn’t listen? What if she keeps running away; how are we going to get her to come back? What if she attacks us? We’ll have to fight back, won’t we? We have to bring her home somehow, but..._

But he doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know.

Diego lets his face turn stony. They don’t need to know that. Leaders have to always know what to do. They have to be decisive.

“Well, I’ll make that call when we get to it. It’s a hard call, but I’ll make it, and I’ll do it right.”

`What do you know about ‘hard calls,’ #2?`

_Two? That’s real fucking low. Show some damn respect._

Diego knocks the notepad out of her hands, sending it fluttering like a wounded bird down to the floor of the car. He’s being generous, because what he wants to do is take that damn thing and flick it up onto the roof. He could, you know. He could do it right now, if he wanted to. She can talk, but only because he’s letting her.

She’s stooped over, digging for it, and the flash of anger that clouded his mind fades.

It’s a fair question, he thinks, a reasonable question, a question about leadership, and what leaders do. And what leaders do is make the hard calls, the ones that make their followers’ skin crawl. Luther had made them throughout their childhood, he’d made them that night in the Icarus, and now the burden is on Diego’s shoulders. 

It’s a burden he’s carried before, actually.

“I made one just a few weeks ago. Back when we were all at the house. You remember what happened to Mom?”

“Yeah?” asks Klaus.

“I was the one who put her down.” 

It’s very quiet in the car for a while.

 _“Why?”_ croaks Allison, her voice sending a skitter of visceral discomfort down his spine.

Diego swallows. “Because I… B-be-because I…”

Why _did_ he do that? Why--

No. Bullshit. Diego’s leading this team; he doesn’t answer to them, _they_ answer to _him._

He glares at her. “I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

Diego swings the door open, and steps out. “Now come on, we’re wasting time.”

Klaus, eager to sidestep the snakepit that he sensed opening up in that car, leaps out after him, and Allison stares at him for a long moment, but ultimately follows, her mouth set in a sour line.

They need to move fast, to get a sense of the geography, and narrow down where Vanya would think to head. Diego knows they won’t be able to linger long before they attract undue attention...

And Diego’s halfway down the street, deep into searching the half-swept brick dust for any recognizable shoe prints he can begin the process of tracking her with, when he realizes they haven’t followed him.

_God, it’s like herding cats._

Diego stalks back, and finds them still gathered around the car, peering at the damage it’d taken to the rear. 

Shit. He forgot about the bullet holes. Someone’s going to notice them soon. 

“You know,” Klaus says, experimentally sticking his finger into one. “You never did tell us what happened here. Did you steal the car from some mobsters or something?”

“No,” Diego says. “You remember those assassins, the funny ones with the masks? The ones that attacked the mansion _and_ the ones that showed up at the theater?”

Klaus grimaces. “Too vividly.” 

“Well, there are more of them. Or, there are people _like_ them, here in the city.”

 _“What?”_ Allison creaks.

“Yeah, they came out of nowhere a couple days ago, right around when I met up with Luther. There were three of them. White hair, but not old, like they’d dyed it. And these big trenchcoats with huge guns.” He notes the blank looks on their faces. “I take it you haven’t run into them.” 

“And they’re here for _us?”_ Klaus asks.

“Well, who _else_ would they be here for?”

“Fair enough. Where’d they come from?”

“Hard to say.” Diego frowns. “You know, the funny thing is, I spent _weeks_ here without running into anybody? Nobody ever broke into the asylum to try and gun me down. It was only when I ran into Luther--”

“So they’re after Luther specifically?” wonders Ben.

“They’re just after _him,_ then,” parrots Klaus. 

_God,_ Diego thinks, _is_ everything _about Luther?_

“I guess,” he admits sourly.

Allison goes rigid. 

`Still out there?` she’s written hastily.

“Yeah, I mean. I suppose so.” 

As soon as the words slip out of his mouth, Diego knows what Allison means: _the assassins will be on our brother’s trail, and we should go find him._

There’s a tightness in Diego’s chest that he doesn’t recognize, mixed in with the jealousy. 

“Look,” he says, surprising himself with his own honesty. “I don’t like this.”

He doesn’t. He really doesn’t like the thought that there’s an enemy out there, stalking their brother. 

_… But._

“But Luther’s going to be able to handle himself, alright? He’s a big boy, he’ll be just fine. You know, he’s probably left the city by now. He’s on his way back to the mansion. Our priority is here, and besides, he made a choice, when he left us. He wanted to be alone, so he can handle this alone. Let Number One look out for Number One for a change.”

She’s staring at him lividly, like she wants to reach out and punch his teeth loose.

“You said you’d follow me,” Diego hisses quickly, leaning in close, and then whipping away, stalking down the street before she can react. He has the last word, so he's won.

There’s a strip of apartment buildings across from the one that’d been destroyed in their encounter with Vanya. Maybe someone saw something.

“Klaus?”

“Yeah?”

“Come here, I’m gonna need you to help me talk to these people. See if they saw what happened the other night?” 

Klaus is on his heels in a second, an extra spring in his step.

Behind them, Allison is at a crossroads. She already knows where she needs to go, but she still feels rooted in place, for a minute more, hating herself for what she’s about to turn her back on, and for how instantaneous and instinctive her decision was.

She stares at her crumpled notepad, then up at the debris littering the street. Allison scours long and hard, left and right, for a flash of a white suit jacket, a shock of silver hair, a flicker of bluish light. 

But there’s nothing.

She acts on her choice. 

An hour later, Diego and Klaus (and Ben) emerge from the apartment building, skulking back empty-handed and dishumored.

“... Last I saw,” Diego’s saying, already grasping for his next move, “Vanya was headed up the street _that_ way, up north, so I’m thinking if she cut through that cemetery a few blocks over, we might be on the right track. But we’re gonna need the car to…”

He stops.

The car’s gone. And so is Allison.

“She _didn’t,”_ Diego breathes.

“She totally did.”

“She’s right,” says Ben, who Klaus ignores.

They don't need to wonder too hard about where Allison has gone, or what she intends to do. She's Allison, and they know her. And they know that when things go to hell, Allison has Luther's back. Always, always, _always._

On the ground, under a salvaged bottle is a carefully-folded note, from stationary Diego recognizes immediately as having come from Allison’s notepad. 

Klaus picks it up, unfolds it, and Diego watches his eyebrows shoot into his forehead as he begins scanning it.

“What does it say?”

“You _sure_ you want me to read this out loud?”

* * *

It takes Luther a while to figure out the bus schedule.

It’s not that he’s stupid. Luther can kill a man in a dozen different ways. He can stitch up a bullet wound, and navigate his way just about anywhere based only on the stars. He’s fluent in seven different languages and can fly a spacecraft from Earth to the Moon. He can fix a tear in the hull of a space station with only ten percent of his oxygen left, and he can grow a garden in zero gravity. 

It’s that he’s just got his limits, and once he’s outside them, he’s a very, _very_ slow learner. And as it turns out, his limits fall short of ordinary things, like navigating streets, or figuring out which bus line to take. 

He’s never had to take a bus before, is the thing. He’s hardly ever left the house in his life, and now suddenly he’s been thrust in the middle of a city that he’s never been, in a time he’s never been. 

And Luther thinks it’s important to get things right, so he decides to take it slowly, reading over the routes carefully, and tracing the trails of cities and counties until he finds the one that carries him home. It’d be terrible, to take the wrong bus and find himself lost somewhere in the middle of the country; after all, Allison only gave him so much to use for his fare. 

He has another reason for being slow, one he’d rather keep to himself. He keeps looking up and around at the station, hoping that any minute he’ll see Allison striding through in search of him, or Klaus or even Diego or Vanya, or Five, who’d finally decided to show his face in time to help Luther set the timeline right. 

If he gives them enough time, the logic goes, then they’ll catch up to him.

And then they don’t. 

The shadows creep across the street, Luther has spent the better part of a day sitting on a bench, committing a trail of towns to heart and searching for siblings who will not arrive. 

He feels silly, thinking they would. Luther may be able to lead his family, but he’s never been very good at drawing them together. 

The bus comes, and Luther is on it when it goes. 

He settles in for a long trip; it’ll take over a day to get all the way up to the city, so he’s content to sit back, watch the scenery roll by, and think over exactly how he’s going to speak to his father. 

Dad isn’t a good man, and he’s never had any of his children’s best interests at heart; Luther knows that now. 

But he’s a reasonable one, and if Luther just finds the right words to say, he’s sure he can get him to listen. After all, the fate of the world is at stake, and their father is obsessed with the fate of the world; he’d offered up the childhoods of each and every one of his wards on a pyre to stave off the apocalypse, so it would simply _make sense_ that when faced with a step-by-step walkthrough of how to prevent it, he would listen. 

Luther runs the words over and over in his head, like a script he’s trying to memorize. 

_My name is Luther Hargreeves, and I’m your son from the future. I time-traveled here from the year 2019 with my family to warn you about the apocalypse, and tell you how to stop it..._

He feels the bus jerk out of stasis and roll out of the station.

_My name is Luther Hargreeves..._

They pass by a blur of faces on the street below, and none of those faces are those of his siblings.

_… and I’m your son from the future…_

The man in front of him has fallen asleep already, and Luther can hear his sputtering snores. He wishes he could relax that easily.

_… I time-traveled here from the year 2019 with my family..._

There’s a stain of orange at the edge of the sky, where the sun’s rolling down. 

_… to warn you about the apocalypse..._

They’ve stopped in Plano, and Luther is looking out the window, at the people standing in line to get on the bus, searching for the faces of his family among them.

And he freezes.

There are three white-haired men of an ambiguous age in long, heavy coats, one tall, one short, one neither tall nor short, standing at the rear of the line. 

Luther remembers them instantly; how could he not?

And he knows immediately what they’re hiding under their coats, and what they’re going to do once they climb on board.

So he jumps to his feet and shoulders his way off the bus, sending the whole thing pitching with the force at which he leaps from the door.

He starts running.

They’ll have seen him now, they won’t have been able to _miss_ him, given how he’s gone charging out like a silverback, but at least now he has a chance to get away, to escape, or to at least draw them away from all these people…

He’s halfway down the street, when the too-familiar thunderous rattle of gunfire sounds behind him, and he picks up his pace, his enlarged heart slamming in his chest. 

Yes, they’ve seen him, and they’re coming.

Luther runs into the deep purple twilight. He has no idea where he’s going. He’s never been here before, all the streets blur together, all the houses look the same, and he doesn’t know where to run, or where to hide, but he knows he has to _move._

The thing about Luther’s skin is that it can take an incredible amount of punishment. He can walk through fire and come out with only a light singe. Single bullets can bounce right off of him, and only leave a bruise.

But, as Luther had learned painfully well when he was a boy during his father’s extensive exploration of his power’s limitations, if you send a persistent enough bombardment of bullets his way, his skin _will_ break under the pressure. He’s very tough, but he is not invulnerable. The explosion that had lead to his disfigurement, and the deep layer of scarring that’d been carved into his body afterwards by his own hands are testament enough to that.

That’s what he’s thinking now, when the gunfire’s coming from behind him, _no,_ to his left, _no,_ ahead, _no,_ they’ve surrounded him, and he’s caught in the middle of the street; they’d split up, and they’d fanned out like a pack of wolves, and now they’re closing in on him.

Well, at least he’s the only one on the street. At least he won’t have to worry about any collateral, as long as everyone stays in their houses, as long as that car pulling in ahead knows to turn away or at least keep its distance. 

His legs are burning and quivering, his lungs heaving hungrily, his heart threatening to burst. He can’t run anymore, so Luther draws up his haunches, and prepares for a fight and thinks: _how long can I hold out?_

There’s a lull, in which the assassins are reloading, and Luther is tensing himself, trying to recall the assassins he’d fought earlier in the week. That big one, the one in the bear mask, he’d been _strong_ like Luther was; not _as_ strong, but close enough to make the fight grueling.

Luther examines them closely, searching for any indication of some sort of hidden strength, and he thinks he sees it: their guns are enormous, and they’re carrying them like they’re made of hollow plastic. 

_Great,_ he thinks sourly. _If they have that going for them, and there’s three of them, and they have those guns, this fight’s going to be too close. I stand a chance at winning, but that chance is slim._

There are three of him, and there’s only one of him, and he can only take them out one at a time. 

So, Luther, for lack of any other plan, opts to launch himself at full speed at one of the men, before he can finish reloading. 

He charges, the world blurring as he makes his way closer, and closer, and--

A flash of metal, an explosion of pain in the side of his head, and the pavement smashing into his side.

Luther blinks, tasting a burst of blood in his mouth. 

And he gets it: The man had swung his gun around, and clanged Luther in the head with it, sending him plummeting to the ground the way a tree falls, hard and impossibly slow.

Everything’s spinning. The world is spinning, and the street is spinning, and there are three of them, or is it three of just _him,_ or six, or _nine,_ or--

A screech, high and vicious as a hawk’s in the midst of a death spiral. A blur of black metal. A gush of exhaust that curdles in Luther’s nose. A musical clatter of metal bouncing and rolling and twisting. A wet crunch, and a spray of hot liquid that Luther knows instantly will smear away from his face onto his hand bright red. A curtain of black hair swinging down over him. 

And Allison’s face, floating before him, wide-eyed with worry. She’s practically glowing in the warm golden light of the street lamps, warm and bright as the sun. 

The world stops spinning, and comes into sharp focus.

Allison smiles, triumphant.

She’d spent the afternoon crawling through downtown Dallas, finding a bus schedule and squinting at it for some time. Being, of course, a fabulously wealthy celebrity, she hadn’t exactly used public transportation more than a handful of times in her life, and all of those times had been in the past month, strictly within the city limits. She’d deciphered the straightest shot back to their home city, and known implicitly that Luther would favor it. And so, she’d climbed into the car, and gone following it.

She hadn’t needed to follow it for long.

Allison had found him hours later, in the velvet depths of twilight, lured by the thunderous crackle of gunfire, echoing from street to street.

And then there had been Luther, right in front of her, caught at the center of three figures, white-haired and long-coated. She’d seen him dive at one of the men, and she’d seen him fall.

And Allison had decided that the simplest answer would be the most effective one. 

She floored it, and ran them the fuck over. 

Two of the men had gone sailing through the air, skidding onto the pavement at a force that ought to kill them, but Allison had gotten the sense that it wouldn’t be that easy.

She swung the passenger-side door open, crawled across the seat, and winced at the clatter of odds and ends that went pouring out into the street as she did so. Allison peered out the side, leaning out on her forearms, and discovered that the third had his skull crushed beneath her wheel.

 _Well, lucky me,_ Allison thought.

For just a second, she fell prey to the grisly sort of intrusive thought that often plagues ex-child soldiers: _Isn’t it odd, how smashed pumpkins and smashed skulls are so similarly pulpy?_

Then she shook it off, as lightly as she would a pleasant wind, and turned to peer into Luther’s eyes, to check him for a concussion.

When she watches him straighten at the sight of her, she knows he’ll be just fine.

“Hi,” she whispers. 

“Hi,” he replies, a big, stupid smile crawling across his face. 

There’s a rustle of movement to their left, and instantly, the spell is broken.

Two of the men are still alive. 

Luther tugs himself up, and Allison hops out of the car, toeing carefully out of her heels, as though she were simply drunk, and not about to commit bloody murder. She sets one down carefully on the floor of the car, and takes the other by the toe into her hand.

“You go left, I go right?”

She nods.

And they set to it. 

Luther goes high, snatching the tall man by the hair and lifting him clean off the ground, swinging him like a ragdoll and sending him flying towards the curb. 

Allison aims low, sweeping her legs out to kick the hands of the short man before he can get them on his gun, and driving a sharp, thin heel as far into his eye socket as she can force it. This she uses as leverage to leap onto his back, sending him staggering back towards the car.

She doesn’t expect for the man to whip around, to let her weight twist the both of them backwards, which sends her flying down into the street.

Allison gasps like a landed fish as her back hits the pavement hard, and the weight of the assassin above her wriggles, crushing her as she clings ferociously to him, clawing at his eyes. She has to keep her grip on him, to keep him from turning, from taking her neck into his hands and squeezing, but he’s slipping.

There’s a hideous cracking sound somewhere to her right, the sound of a spine crunching in Luther’s fingers; these men are unnaturally strong, but not as strong as him, and he’s winning.

The man above her pauses. He’s heard it too; he knows what it means. 

Allison realizes too late that she’s hesitated, when he worms loose of her hands and turns. She throws an arm up, to beat at his face.

A soft metallic _ping_ sounds from somewhere beyond her, and there’s a silver flash, as Luther drives the toe of his boot into the bright canister of Aqua Net, sending it skidding like a rocket across the street to bounce off of Allison’s shoulder. 

Allison snatches it, bashes the blunt end into the man’s temple. He winces, drawing back, and she uses the opening to twist her legs around his middle and wrench him to the ground, rolling her torso up so she’s pinning him beneath her.

She flicks the cap off the can of hairspray, and sprays long and hard, directly into his eyes.

He’s on the ground now, among the odds and ends that had fallen from the car: cigarettes and pens and pulp novels, a lipstick tube and a lighter, and...

A lighter.

Allison snatches it, sparks up a flame, and holds it just in the path of the aerosol.

And the can does the rest of the work for her, bathing the assassin’s face in a concentrated plume of orange fire. 

Allison doesn’t take her finger off the trigger until well after he’s stopped moving.

Then, she accepts Luther’s outstretched hand, climbs to her feet, and retrieves her shoes.

The fight, Luther thinks, lasted about a minute, in all. How strange, how time seems to stretch so long, before snapping ahead like a rubber band.

They stand, staring at each other for a moment, still in the throes of their adrenaline high, heaving long and heavy breaths, their hearts skidding excitably.

Allison wants to kiss him. It’s a feeling similar to, but quite unlike wanting a cigarette, a burning in her mouth and her chest. She doesn’t want ash in her mouth anymore. She wants something good.

And sure, it isn’t the most practical thing in the world, to kiss someone in the middle of the street, thirty seconds after you’ve just experienced the wondrous thrill of killing someone who’s tried to kill you and the person you love. 

But Allison figures, why not?

So she takes his face between her hands, tilts it down, and does it. 

It tastes like rust. It's quick and sweet and utterly extraordinary, and oddly, _exactly_ how she's always pictured herself kissing Luther for the first time.

And then they’re driving, the car awkwardly bumping over the third assassin’s body, cold, humid air whipping through the windows.

 _We’re going to have to put this damn thing out of its misery by the end of the week,_ Allison thinks.

They don’t say a word until they’ve left their would-be killers long behind them, too watchful for any witnesses, ears pricked for the shrill drone of a siren.

There’s nothing, yet.

So eventually, Luther says quietly, “Does this mean you changed your mind?”

Allison sighs. 

That anger she’d felt towards him last night has dissipated like mist; it simply doesn’t matter anymore. They are alive, and they are together, and there is a plan, and she may think it’s wildly misguided and likely doomed to failure, but at least it’s substantive, at least she knows exactly what to expect.

`I hate your plan,` she writes. `But at least you have one.`

“They don’t?”

“No,” she grumbles.

“Well, should we go get them?”

Allison shakes her head. 

It’d be a waste of time, to turn around and head back the way they’d come, to potentially face the people who were surely crouched in their living rooms, watching their fight through the windows. It’d be risky, to drive back into the city with fresh blood on their tires, assuming the police won’t be looking for them. 

And besides, Ben’s already dead, and they’re _Klaus and Diego._ They’ll be just fine.

_And say this works, say Dad listens, say he changes his tune…_

Well, if there’s a chance that one conversation can set everything back into place, then they have to take it. They can bring everyone home, without even being in the same place as them, they can save Vanya, they can save the world, they can save Claire...

Maybe it's better this way; scattered as they are, they might be able to cover more ground. Diego and Klaus can wander around Dallas and look for Vanya, and wait for Five to show up, and she and Luther can pursue another option. 

`If it works, everything fixes itself?`

“How _does_ time travel work?”

Allison shrugs, spreading her fingers wide and wiggling them. The silver of her nail polish flashes, and Luther smiles amusedly. 

“We’ll hope it does,” Luther says. 

She nods. It’ll have to be enough, for now.

Allison reaches over, and tangles their fingers together. 

“Figure it out?” she rasps.

“Yeah, we’ll figure it out.”

* * *

They’ve lost so much time, and Diego’s seething with fury.

He blames a lot of things. 

He blames their lack of a car, the hours they’ve lost because they had to navigate the city by foot, thanks Allison, he _really_ appreciates that. 

He blames Luther, for leaving them for a fool’s mission, and Five, for going AWOL.

He blames Klaus, for trailing him and slowing his pace, and Ben, for being dead. 

He blames Vanya herself, for running and running and running, instead of just standing her ground, or else just shutting the hell up and letting them say their piece. Honestly, they wouldn’t be in this mess if she hadn’t turned tail and fled. 

They’ve lost too much time, and they’ve lost her.

Diego, Ben and Klaus had spent a sleepless night trekking through neighborhood after neighborhood, scanning the dark spaces between the houses for a flash of silver hair. They had first found a trace of her in the cemetery, the one Klaus had been resolute in his refusal to enter, which had cost Diego even more time, as he’d had to comb the entire place on his own, and had tripped over jagged headstones an embarrassingly high number of times.

He’d cried out in triumph, at a set of small, pointy-toed footprints, trailing through the cemetery, recognizing the shape of the shoe, the indentation of the heel, the size of the foot, and knowing that it had to be Vanya. 

It’d been easier after that. The trail led out of the cemetery, and though the prints left by the ruddy mud had eventually stopped in the street, Diego had another trick up his sleeve.

He’d thought: _If I were Vanya, and if I were running away from the family, what would I do?_

Then, he’d stared, out at the vast dark sea of trees hugging the river in the park a few blocks ahead, and he’d known: He’d get as far away from people as he could.

And Diego’s instincts were right: The footprints started up again in the trees, and being the only member of the litter who’d ever really excelled at their father’s tracking lessons, Diego took to her trail like a bloodhound.

For a few blessed hours he’d felt high on the chase. He was in his element again, hunting in the dark, and the hours had flown by. He had a path, but not a plan, but that shouldn’t have mattered, because they were upon her.

They found more and more proof of Vanya: the skid of a chunky heel against a muddy riverbank... small, grasping handprints that told him she’d nearly fallen in... a shred of white fabric caught on a bramble... and there, _eureka,_ a small heeled boot that had once been white, stuck firmly in the mud. Klaus had pried it out with a _pop,_ holding it triumphantly, and they’d gone crashing blindly through the underbrush like a pair of overgrown foxhounds, baying her name. 

And there it was: a muddied white suit jacket, hanging by its collar from the edge of a branch, left there so _deliberately_ that it can’t have possibly torn off while she’d been running; she’d stopped, she’d taken the time to pull it off, to hang it up; she’d intended to _come back._

Klaus had been the one to notice the drainage pipe, to plop automatically to his hands and knees and go tunneling right in, and he’d crawled out a minute later, brandishing a blood-spattered necktie. She had been here, she had likely _slept_ here, but it’d been well after sunset, and she was not there.

Diego had found that odd, had reevaluated the tracks, and found a fresher set leading down to the river, that got lost among a cloud of footprints. 

And the dragging of heels, one sharp and one dull, trailing off in an oddly direct path back towards the road.

By the time Diego, Ben and Klaus had gotten to the curb, Ben had known that they’d gotten there too late. The tracks were old, Diego had said so himself, and if she had been kidnapped, as they implied, it was highly unlikely that her captors would be simply waiting for them to catch up to them. He had voiced this worry to Klaus, who nodded distressedly.

Diego hadn’t realized it, or, having realized it, he had chosen not to believe it.

It’s the only explanation Ben can come up with, for why, when they come across the ruined white ankle boot abandoned on the grass a few feet from the curb, he’d responded by kicking it furiously into the street.

Ben’s right; Diego had a path, but not a plan, and now he doesn’t even have a path anymore. That bright high of clarity he’d felt in the woods, when he’d had his sister’s scent, is gone now, and he’s crashing. 

_We’ve lost too much time,_ Diego is thinking, _and we’ve lost her. We were so close, and we missed her, because we were dragging our feet when we should’ve been sprinting._

The trail has gone cold at the curb, and Vanya had been taken by someone, and how much time had been _wasted,_ how much _faster_ could he have gone if he’d just done it alone?

He’d been ready for a fight, with Vanya, with whoever's taken her, he’d been ready for anything, but not for nothing at all, and now he’s right back where he started. 

Diego runs his fingers along the chain around his neck urgently. He’s right back where he started, and he’s just as lost as he was before he’d found her scent. He feels as adrift as he was between patrols back in the city, back in the future. Crimefighting to him had been like anything at the menu at Wok ‘N’ Roll: you eat it and you’re bloated for half an hour, but then you’re sticking your head in the fridge, desperate for leftovers.

And this isn’t the same, he _knows_ it isn’t the same, so why is he so _hungry?_

Ben watches him stalk back and forth across the road uneasily, calling to Klaus to conjure him, so he might try to settle him down, but Klaus won’t. He’s still panting from their frenzied sprint across the park, and if he conjures one ghost, who’s to say he won’t send up a beacon that’ll send them all running his way? He’s already got that blurry shape at the edge of the street in the corner of his eye, the one that keeps edging closer, the one that looks like a shadow, but isn’t attached to anything that might be throwing it. He doesn’t want to give this guy any ideas. 

So he’s content to wait out the storm of Diego’s temper, sitting on the curb and thumbing through a newspaper that’d been discarded in the gutter.

Kennedy’s on the front page, and Klaus recalls what will happen in five days, thinking, _oh, the irony._

When they’d been fourteen, he and Diego had started a band. It’d been Vanya’s idea, originally, some sort of last-ditch attempt to get them to hang out with her, which they’d turned their noses up at. 

They’d decided to go ahead with the band without her, which, in retrospect, Klaus will admit had been a bit of a dick move. But hey, she’d been shipped off to that fancy school a month later, so it’s not like she’d have stuck around anyway, the band would have always been theirs, his and Diego’s; they just decided to spare her the trouble of leaving it. 

At least, that’s what he’d told himself. 

He isn’t totally sure if he believes that anymore. 

They’d called it the Prime-8s, and ultimately, its formation had been an expression of rebellion on Diego’s part, and a strategic move on Klaus’s; after all, the prospect of gaining access to clubs and concert halls where he might buy drugs was simply _too_ tempting to pass up on. They had only played one gig at the punk bar downtown, and Klaus had spent half of it snorting lines in the cramped, filthy bathroom, the one with the toilet covered in band stickers. 

They’d only ever written one real song. He can’t remember any of the words now, but he sort of remembers the chords. It had been called I Don’t Wanna Kill The President.

“Hey Diego,” he drawls. “You wanna be a hero so bad, why don’t you save JFK?”

Diego whips his head around, eyes burning with anger.

Klaus’s stomach drops. _Wow, okay, tough crowd._

But no, it’s not _just_ that.

It’s that Diego is seething in a way that Klaus just isn’t used to.

He’s always been aware of Diego’s particular way of contending with the world. It’s kind of hard to _not_ see his tendency to take anyone who challenges him and flay them wide open. It’s a given that if you’re around Diego, it’ll only be a matter of time before he’s peeling back skin and muscle and sinew to expose the bones and carve his insults into them.

And that’s the thing: Diego’d never really done that to him before.

They’d _always_ gotten along. As kids, they’d been friendly enough, but as teenagers, they guarded each other's secrets, as they started acting out, becoming allies in their rebellion. They’d cover for each other when they’d show up to training late, give each other a leg up as they slipped out the basement window to go meet some Academy groupies. They’d sit on the roof at sunset, and Klaus would drink beer, and Diego would practice his aim on the empty cans, lining them up on the edge of the wall and knocking them off, one by one. 

They _got_ each other, they had _fun_ together, and even when Diego got angry, Klaus had never borne the brunt of it, and that’s the problem now, because all of a sudden he _is._

 _This isn’t fun at all, is it?_ thinks Klaus, rather childishly.

“We need to circle back,” Diego’s saying, “Back to the cemetery, we need to--”

“No,” Klaus says, his gut clenching. “No, we’re not going there. I’m not going there.”

Absolutely not. He’s going to keep his distance from that place, thank you _very_ much.

Diego, hard and sharp and fast and obsessed with victory, does not take it well.

“Then what’s the _use_ of you?” he snarls. “Honestly, Klaus, you’ve just been dead weight on me this whole time!”

“Really? You think that?” 

“Yes! You’ve just been nipping at my heels all night. I found those tracks, I found where Vanya’s been staying, I found that trail leading us here. What the hell have _you_ done, that I couldn’t have just done _myself?”_

Klaus sets the newspaper down, leaping to his feet and stalking after Diego.

“Oh? You wanna do this yourself?”

Diego doesn’t like what he says next, but he knows it to be true.

“You know,” he says, turning, keeping his tone good and quiet so it’ll make Klaus lean in, “I think I do. I think I don’t need you at all.”

It’s the right path, he’s sure of it. Leaders know how to cut the fat, how to drop the dead weight, and everyone’s been so damn _heavy,_ he may as well liberate himself of them.

Klaus stares at him, long and hard. 

Their particular brand of brotherhood has always been strange, theirs and that of the rest of their family. It’d taken him a long time, to figure it out though. It wasn’t until he’d left the house, and had been well and truly out in the world for the first time, that he’d understood that their definitions of _brother_ and _sister_ and _mother_ and _father_ were wildly different from everyone else’s; by God, the _looks_ he’d gotten when he’d gotten too loose-lipped at a party and let it slip that Allison and Luther loved playing Mommy and Daddy, or when he’d had the insides of his wrist caned when he’d asked a reporter who’d mentioned she too had been adopted how much her parents had bought her for.

Their brotherhood _(or brother-and-sisterhood,_ he supposes, remember Allison, even if she had been one of the boys their entire lives) isn’t that of the conventional garden-variety family, adopted or otherwise, but rather, theirs is that of the foxhole. 

_Well, jokes on Diego,_ Klaus realizes, reaching up to tug at his dog tags. He’s got a whole other sort of foxhole brotherhood that’s all his own.

In fact…

_In fact, there’s no reason at all why I can’t go reignite it, is there?_

Dave dies in 1969, and that’s six years from now, which means... 

He’s still alive. 

He’s still alive, and God, he’s even in the fucking _neighborhood._ Dave’s family is from Texas, from Fort Worth, just a stone’s throw away. God, he’s an idiot.

Klaus straightens. 

“Okay,” he says instead, beginning to tread backwards, away from him, throwing up his hands in supplication. “Okay, sure. You have fun. You go do it yourself, brother, have a _great_ time!”

He turns on his heel, and makes a sharp turn down the nearest street that’ll get him out of Diego’s eyeline, and he doesn’t let himself look back.

Fucking Diego, who won’t take that damn knife harness off, who probably thinks there’s broken glass and bullet casings and nefarious purse snatchers piled high in every alley, who’s still high on his own bullshit. 

“Some family,” he says, half to himself, half to Ben, who’s come trailing him, the way he always does. “I’m really feeling the love. You think we’ll make s’mores and sing _Kumbaya_ around a campfire later? You know, there’s a reason I never told Dave about them.”

Ben’s tense. 

_Not a fan of the fight, huh?_ Klaus supposes. Ben always had been the peacemaker of the group, not that the magazines ever remembered that when they told them about it in their interviews; they’d always assumed it was Allison, which he’s always found hilarious, if a little sexist. 

“God, where the hell _is_ Allison?” he wonders aloud, mostly to fill the empty street with noise. “You think she remembered to stop for gas? You know, I sure do love how _great_ a team we’ve become. Real indivisible, the kinda stuff that’d make Dad _so_ proud.”

Ben huffs out a quick laugh at that, and Klaus smiles to himself.

“I need to find a way to Glen Oaks,” he says.

“Glen Oaks? Is that where Luther’s going?”

Ben’s still on about Luther, huh? Doesn’t he know that plan won’t work?

“No,” Klaus says, “I’m not looking for Luther.”

“Well, is that where Allison’s heading?”

Klaus shakes his head. 

“Well… where…”

“You know, Dave told me his family’s from around here. Fort Worth, I’m pretty sure. His uncle has this hardware store in Glen Oaks. He told me he used to work there, a couple years before he enlisted.”

“Klaus.”

He isn’t really listening. A vision’s whirling before him now, a bright and fluffy and alarmingly domestic vision of a life here, in the sixties, where a lot of things suck, but the music doesn’t, where it feels like the world ends but it won’t, not for sixty years. He could live here, he could even grow old here, he might even be dead by the time the _real_ apocalypse hits, wouldn’t that be nice? 

“You know, I could get into that. I could get into the hardware store life. I don’t know exactly what they do, but they build stuff, I think, and they paint houses. I could paint.”

“You’d be a cashier,” Ben replies flatly.

Silence. Then: “Oh. Well. It’ll just be a paycheck gig then. You think minimum wage’s technically better here? Isn’t the cost of living a lot cheaper in the past?”

 _“Klaus._ We’re not staying.”

“Why not?”

“It’s the fucking sixties, Klaus. _What’s_ here?”

 _“Dave_ is.”

Klaus, like all of the Hargreeves siblings, had only been happy a scant few times in his life. Most of those times he can remember had been with Dave. From the moment he’d plucked him off the floor of the tent, he’d understood him so instantly; it was almost supernatural, how quickly he’d been attuned to him, how seamlessly he’d tugged him into his side and guided him into the war machine and cared for him in those few quiet moments between it all. And being cared for is so, _so_ nice.

He’d been at war, it’s true, but things had made sense out there. Klaus knows what to do when he’s pinned down in a war zone. He knows what to do when he’s enduring sleepless nights, or trekking through enemy territory. He knows what to do when someone’s by his side, guiding him along. 

“God, Klaus, what about the world? We have to stay, we have to help save it! They can’t do it without us, they can’t do it without me! You’re not stupid, you _know_ that!”

The world as he’d known it, the Real World, where there are no men trying to kill you every day, no orders to take, no brothers pinned down by your side, had simply never been for him. And to be perfectly honest, when he thinks of it now, and how it’s withered to dust, he doesn’t ache too much for it. 

“They’ll be fine,” he says. “They’ll make do without me. They’ll solve the apocalypse, and they’ll get Vanya, and it’ll all work itself out. I don’t need to be here for it, so you know what? Maybe I _won’t_ be.”

Ben stares at him. 

God, what _is_ it with him?

“And you know what?" Klaus snaps, "If you care _so much_ about saving the world, why don’t you go haunt Diego, then? Why don't you fuck off, and leave me be?”

It’s a mistake, he knows instantly. He shouldn’t have said that. He's crossed a line, into one of the topics they'd agreed long ago they would never, ever discuss.

“That’s not fair,” Ben says quietly. “You know I can’t.”

Klaus can't look at him for the rest of the night. The weight of the pills in his pocket is so, so heavy.

* * *

The locations of each and every one of Five’s siblings (the ones who had been alive when he’d jumped them into the past, that is; he’s still uncertain if ghosts can time travel) are flagged. 

Five had seen the images of them all, of Luther and Diego and Klaus and Allison and Vanya, blurry images taken from a far distance by long-focus lenses. They’d been taken by Commission field agents, the ones tasked with confirming any suspected anomalies in the timeline, before any further decisions can be made about what’s to be done with them. Five had likely been followed by one such photographer, sicced on him by Dot, the snitch, when he’d landed in 2019 and his appearance had first been noticed by the operators on the Infinite Switchboard.

Shortly before Five had been dispatched, he’d made a request to see their respective anomaly reports. The excuse he’d given was that he wanted to evaluate which of his siblings would be best fit for his assassination squad, but in truth, he just wanted to know where they were at the last time they were sighted. 

Five knows from an alarmingly detailed file that Diego had been arrested for acting out in a television store, and that he’d escaped from the mental hospital he'd been taken to several weeks later. He knows that Klaus and Allison had been spotted outside a protest at a lunch counter from an incredibly sparse report. He knows that Vanya had been responsible for the destruction of a city street. He knows that Luther had escaped a trio of Commission assassins, who’d just been flagged as killed in the line of duty _(Nicely done,_ he’d thought when he’d read the file).

The reports are old. Anomaly reports, by their nature, are only useful in establishing a rogue traveler’s past behavior; people tend not to stay in the exact same place, after all. His siblings will be no exception, and they will have moved on now, by the time Five has landed, they will have scattered to different places by now, even if the newest report is less than twenty-four hours old, and exactly what Five is using to locate his would-be accomplices. 

That’s what Five keeps telling himself, to stave off the way his mind starts to race when he thinks too hard about how the Commission will know _very_ soon exactly where his family is, that they will then know how to get to them, that they will--

Enough.

Five digs his short nails into his palms, uses the burst of pain to focus himself.

Every member of his family who’d been alive at the time of their jump is still living, and they are all in the same time, in the same general place. 

That is what he focuses on: they are alive, and all of them, save one, will be alive in the foreseeable future.

That one exception is who he must be concerned with now. Once that's settled, he will come for the rest of them. 

Five has requested to land here, on a country road north of Dallas, on the seventeenth of November, 1963, at two in the afternoon, so he can intercept said exception on the route he’d been likely taking, seeing as he’d been last flagged at a newspaper kiosk off the highway.

He has been permitted to do so, however he has not been granted the privilege of a briefcase of his own, and has to cling to the arm of an overworked, tense-looking agent who seems quite miffed to be spending her time as a glorified taxi service for the notorious Number Five, who’d been singularly responsible for the absolute chaos that is the Commission’s current state of operation.

She drops him off in the middle of nowhere, stares at him the way he might stare at a cockroach he wants to introduce to the bottom of his shoe, sips a bit more coffee from her #Girlboss mug, and then is on her way without a word. 

And then Five is alone, standing in the tall yellowed grass on a warm, windy November day, with only his thoughts to keep him company while he waits for his sibling to arrive.

Said sibling will not greet him alone, but Five has no knowledge of this. 

Said sibling, of course, being Luther Hargreeves, who has spent the night with Allison. 

They had chosen to wait the night out, pulled off of the road just outside of the city, each taking turns keeping watch while the other slept, coiled up in the backseat, and when the sun rose, they’d gotten to the business of getting ready for the trip ahead.

While Luther flips open the morning’s newspaper and takes to studying the inner pages carefully, Allison squirms out of her singed cardigan and ruined dress, once they’re certain there will be no one coming up either end of the road anytime soon. There’s blood smeared across her front, and a very prominent footprint on her torn skirt, and it would be a very bad idea for anyone to happen to glimpse her in such a state. 

_Serves me right for going to a fight wearing white,_ Allison thinks wryly. _Dad made us wear black for a reason, after all._

She crams her soiled clothes in next to the brake, resolving to throw them both out the window once they’ve reached a suitable distance from the city, and squeezes into her cigarette pants.

“Feels weird,” Luther says, peering at the news that the President is coming to town, “Knowing what’s about to happen this week. It happens in what, five days?”

Allison hums, buttoning up her pants. “Sounds right,” she murmurs, and Luther’s ears are pricked for her voice, so he catches it without a problem.

It doesn’t hurt anymore, to talk, but she’s right back to grinding each word out like gravel, or else whispering in a perpetually-tired tone. She feels less afraid of her voice out here, where no one can hear her but Luther, so as she tugs a sweater over her head, pulling the sleeves down to cover her tattoo and the fresh bruising that’s beginning to show on her arms, she says, “At least I’m not worried about the nukes. Everyone’s so afraid all the time.”

“Yeah?”

The grass tickles her bare feet as she strides around to the back of the car, where Luther has his back to her. She leans next to him, tapping him lightly on the shoulder to let him know that she’s done, that he can turn and they can get on the road now, which he does.

“Yeah,” she rasps, “I felt lighter, not worrying. The future’s still alive, for a while.”

She thinks about it, as they pull out onto the road and she chooses suitable intervals at which to dump her bloodied clothes into the waterlogged roadside ditch, the dress first, then the cardigan, flapping like strange, bloodstained flags in the wind before they splatter into the mud. 

How strange it is, that everyone had been so terrified of nuclear war, how it’d been a monster looming over them all, and they’d had no choice but to live in its shadow, ever-aware that at any moment, someone could spell out the end of the world in the shape of a mushroom cloud.

How strange, that the ticking bomb that will destroy them all is her own sister.

In the middle of the country, there’s not much else to do but think of the end of the world, so that is what Allison does, as they drive deeper into the rolling green and gold hills. 

She speaks next when they pass a roadside fast food stand, bustling with the activity of fellow travelers. They don’t stop there; it’s segregated, and they’d draw too many questions about why they’re traveling together, or why his fingers had been tangled with hers on the seat.

“All these people,” she says quietly, watching them shrink in her rearview mirror, “They’ll have lived full enough lives by the time it happens. Even the babies will be old.”

She sighs, and her mind starts to drift to Claire. She starts to tap her nails on the wheel nervously.

“We’re going to stop it,” Luther says firmly, so _sure,_ and she nods, determined to break off a piece of his resolution and keep it for herself.

They are going to stop it. They are going to save the world. They are on their way to do it right now.

The morning smears into the afternoon, sunlight plays across their laps like a lazy kitten, and they chat, lazily, about anything and everything. Luther reads through each and every article of the newspaper aloud, and Allison tells him a bit about what it’d been like, waiting for days and days for them to arrive, and he tells her about what it was like to watch a hurricane form in the Atlantic from two hundred thousand miles away. It's nice, really nice, just sitting and talking the way they used to, the way they haven't in years. 

Part of it, of course, is deflection. As long as they're talking about innocuous things, they don't have to address the big question dangling above them like a swinging axe: _what if Dad doesn't believe us?_

And then, they come over the crest of a hill packed thick with corn, swaying in the wind, and they see the first person they’ve come across in an hour.

It’s Five. 

He’s standing casually on the side of the road, cheekily sticking his thumb out into the road. 

_That little shit,_ Luther thinks.

Allison nearly skids off the road at the sight of him, but she recovers, juddering to a halt a few feet from their brother.

He frowns as he processes who’s behind the wheel, displeased at not being aware that Allison would be joining them, but not at the thought that he might need to work with her. 

Five strides up to the window, and taps on it until Allison rolls it down. 

“What time is it?” Five asks.

Allison glances at her watch, grating out, “Three?” and then wincing at her tone.

“You’re late,” Five scowls, choosing to ignore how Allison sounds like she’s been smoking six packs a day for the past twenty years.

In fact, he’s quite relieved that they’re here. Being alone, pacing the same stretch of road back and forth for an hour, has led to Five following the path of the strange, dark thoughts he’s been having a lot lately. He’d been thinking about his body, the old one, the one the surgeons had improved, augmenting his deteriorating form. He’d been wondering if something had been done to his new one while he’d been unconscious, if they hadn’t just smeared the bruises away and closed the wounds, if they’d inserted another tracker into his arm, if he only needs to press hard enough along the pulse point, if he needs to flay it open to dig it out again...

Well. He’s grateful for the distraction.

And he's also just glad that they're here, in front of him, that he can see with his own eyes that at least some of his family is alive and unharmed. 

_"We’re_ late?” Luther frowns, stepping out of the car. “Where the hell have _you_ been for the past few days?”

“I was otherwise engaged,” Five says tersely, leaning on the hood. 

Allison leans out the window, grimacing at the intensity of the sunlight, tugging her notepad out from its place on the dashboard.

Five takes them in carefully, noting the change in clothing, the pink line across Allison’s throat. 

When he’d first jumped into 2019, he’d landed with his memories all scattered. It’d taken a full minute to remember how he’d gotten there at all, and even now, if he tries to look at the memories in anything more than passing, they start to warp and twist and take on a strange filmy grain that makes his head pulse so hard he wants to scratch his eyes out to let the sunlight shine on his brain.

“You’re both alright? All your thoughts aren’t all... mixed up right now? You know how you got here? It’s not… confused?”

Allison and Luther glance at each other, and then nod at Five suspiciously.

Five doesn’t know quite how to feel.

He’s relieved, naturally, that they aren’t as out of it as he’d been.

But… well. Five’s felt outside of reality for a long time now. It’s awful, to wish that deep unbearable dissonance on someone else, but he isn’t a particularly good person; he’s known that for a very long time. He just wants to know that someone else _gets_ it.

It seems that they don’t.

Which, fine.

Allison leans forward, eyes widening in realization. She’s been staring at Five for a moment now, mulling something over, and now, hearing the deeper tinge to his voice, she gets it: _Five’s older._

She tells him as much, scribbling into her notepad and presenting it to him, which he reads aloud with a frown, and nods, a little annoyed.

“Oh,” says Luther, who’d noticed that Five is now the same height as Allison, without her heels. _“Now_ I see it. Hey, how old do you think he is? Not sixteen, right?”

`14? 15?`

“Sure,” Five says flatly, “We’ll go with that. Anyway.”

He climbs into the backseat, and Luther slips back in after him.

“How’d you find us?” Luther wonders.

“The Temps had your location flagged.”

“What?”

Five frowns. “Where _is_ everyone else?”

Allison and Luther glance at each other.

“So,” Luther says, “Good news: We’re all alive. Well, Ben’s not, but--”

“Ben’s here?”

“Yeah, he got stuck to Klaus when he jumped. We talked to him.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He has a lot of opinions.”

“So you’ve been in contact with Klaus, too?”

“We were all together, a day ago.”

“Oh, well, great. Where are they?” Five doesn't need them for this assignment; he'd just like to know where they are. 

“That’s the bad news.” Luther swallows. “Vanya… kind of hates us?”

`She ran away,` writes Allison. `Blew stuff up.`

“Well, what did you _do?”_

`Panic.`

_Of course,_ Five thinks sourly.

He sighs. The problem of Vanya is one he's going to have to ignore for now. He feels terrible, dismissing her as quickly as he is, but he has to.

“Diego and Klaus split off from us,” Luther says. “I think Ben’s with them, but I’m not totally sure how this ghost thing works.”

“We’ll assume that he is.”

“Right, so Diego, Klaus and Ben are going after her. She’s on foot, so she’s probably somewhere in the city, or close by. We just don’t know where.”

“And what’re you doing out here?”

`Driving north to Dad’s.`

“The idea is,” Luther says, “If we talk to him, and tell him everything that’s happened, he’ll know what to do to prevent it.”

Five picks up on it: “So if he does, the apocalypse won’t happen. And because the apocalypse won’t happen...”

Allison concludes: We won’t be here. We’ll be back in 2019.

“Huh, that’s… Okay, that’s a pretty cost-effective plan. Not bad, Allison.”

Allison shakes her head.

"Oh... Luther? _Really?"_

“Why are you so surprised?”

“I didn’t think you were that smart, to be honest.”

Luther decides that he's going to take that as a compliment. 

Allison glances down, at the folder under Five’s arm, and she cocks her head.

`Where were you?` writes Allison, before dropping her notepad into her lap as she pulls off the side of the road and gets to driving.

“Long story,” Five sighs.

“Well, it’s a long way to Dad, so we’ve got time.”

“No, actually, we don’t,” Five says, leaning his forehead against the window, to get a better look at the farmhouse they’re rolling past. “And you’re going to need to turn us around.”

“Why?” croaks Allison.

“Don’t tell us,” Luther grimaces, “The world’s gonna end in a few days, and it’s our fault again.” 

“No, actually.”

Allison sighs in relief. One apocalypse is as much as she can handle at a time, thank you very much.

“We just have to assassinate President Kennedy on the orders of my former boss at the Commission. If we don't, Luther and I will both be erased from the timeline because our biological mother will murdered before she can give birth to us." Five taps the folder in his lap, and then adds helpfully: "We're twins, by the way."

The pair digest the news silently.

Five notices a soft, fluffy shape bouncing in the window of the farmhouse. “That’s one cute puppy.” 

Allison groans, and turns them around, taking care to make her turn rough enough to jerk Five across the backseat and send him into the window with a _thunk._

The first place they stop, once they’re back in Dallas, is a liquor store. Allison gets the sense that they’re going to need it.

She is correct.

* * *

Diego wakes in the shade of the bridge he’d curled up under, with the ever-present chain digging into his neck. 

He grimaces, going to untangle it, reaching reflexively over to shake Klaus awake, and--

Oh. Oh yeah.

He’s alone now. 

_God, what a fucking mess,_ he thinks, running a hand through his hair. He’d slept terribly, plagued by one of those awful dreams he’d always had as a kid, of running and running and running, reaching for something that was always out of his grasp. He’d always trip, at the end of those dreams, and right before his chin would slam into the pavement, he’d jolt himself awake. 

He looks around, left then right. A part of him expects to see Klaus come ambling down the steep grassy side of the hill he’s curled up on, to see Allison picking her way down carefully after him, even Luther shuffling down.

But there’s no one. Just him, and this hill, and the slope leading up to the curb where his trail had gone cold. 

Of course they left. He’d never been enough for them.

 _Some leader you’d turn out to be,_ hisses an aged, accented voice in the back of his mind, and Diego shakes his head, like he’ll send it flying out his ears.

He rolls out of the grass, and climbs up the slope, back towards the curb. He’ll have to just keep at it. Look for tire tracks, ask around and see if anyone had seen anything. 

He’s over the slope now, staring off at the curb, at the bright white splotch of her shoe against the grass, like a downed bird.

Diego frowns.

There’s a slim dark figure waiting for him there, a figure that reveals itself as Lila Pitts when he makes his way close enough to make out her face.

Diego’s mouth pops open, forming the question: _what?_

She’s standing just on the edge of the curb, with perfect posture, staring expectantly at him, like she’d known he’d be coming to this exact spot, from that exact direction.

 _Oh,_ he thinks dully. _She_ is _crazy after all. She’s been tracking me._

She looks completely different from the last time he’d seen her; she’s polished and sharp as a Doberman, clad in a sleek black turtleneck and a tight pair of cigarette pants. The only speck of color on her is on her feet, a pair of deep red combat boots that he keeps looking at. He doesn’t understand why they bother him so much in particular, when overall, he’s left with the impression that she’s playing dress-up. 

He feels better about the way he left her now; it’s clear that she’s showered, she’s found a change of clothes, she’s even gotten a haircut, and there’s a suitcase at her feet. She’s found someone, a family member or a friend maybe, who’d helped her out. 

_See,_ he tells himself, _she was fine. You were right._

He gets close enough to make out the features of her face, to distinguish the thick dark makeup smeared over her eyes, making them look heavy and weary, like she hasn’t slept, or she’s been crying. 

“Hey,” he says, “Sorry about the, uh…”

“Water under the bridge. It’s been _forever.”_ She shrugs, waving a hand. Her nails are painted deep red, the exact same shade as her boots. 

“It hasn’t,” he says, softer than he’d have liked to.

He comes to a stop, a few feet away from her, standing on the head of her long, narrow shadow, and frowns.

Her hair seems longer, somehow, and there’s a suitcase at her feet.

Wait.

No, it’s not a suitcase. It’s a _briefcase._

Diego thinks back, to that week before the world ended, to the scattered mentions of assassins he’d heard in passing from Five and Klaus, to the nutjobs who’d attacked his house, to the trio who’d just gone after Luther and himself a few days ago.

And he thinks about Lila. About how _odd_ it’d been that she’d just popped in out of nowhere, how she’d appeared outside his cell the night he escaped. 

Diego tenses. 

“You’re not from Louisiana, are you?”

The corner of her lip perks up. She seems pleased.

“You _are_ sharp, aren’t you?” 

Now he gets what it is about her that’d been so curious to him; she hadn’t just been out of place, she’d been out of _time._

Now that he’s seen it, he can’t unsee it: the streaks of fading dye in her hair, a style that won’t be worn in the sixties, that she has because she hadn’t _been_ in the sixties until very recently. The extra inch of hair feathering against her shoulders, that hadn’t been there days ago, that she has because it’s been far longer for her than it has for him. The combat boots, so odd to him because they’re in a style that shouldn’t _exist_ yet.

She’s a time-traveler. 

“Who are you?” he asks, slipping a hand pointedly into his shirt, to grasp at one of his knives. 

She’s watching him amusedly, like a cat watches her prey nip at her paws.

“Who I said I was. Lila Pitts.”

“No, you didn’t mention _this.”_

Lila rolls her eyes. “Obviously. I think I’d have remembered if I had, you know.”

He has his knife in his hand now, he could flick it loose and take the briefcase, and--

“Have lunch with me?” she asks, rather suddenly.

He blinks.

“Oh, do relax. I’m not going to _do_ anything to you.”

“Yeah? Sure about that?”

“Of course! In fact, I’m here to work _with_ you, you know.” 

“What do you mean?”

Lila leans down, pulling a folder from the outer pocket of her briefcase, and presenting it to him with a flourish.

He reaches for it, but she tugs it away with a flick of her wrist, teasingly. But he can read what’s printed on the outside of it:

`Anomaly Report: Vanya Hargreeves`

`Date: 11.18.1963`

His mouth goes dry.

“So,” Lila says, “Like I said. Lunch.”

They go to a diner that will serve them, a place she knows how to get to immediately. Lila navigates the streets coolly and confidently, totally unfazed, like she’s walked this path a hundred times, like she has the address written on the inside of her mind. 

_Maybe she does,_ he thinks. 

But it’s a good place to meet with a time-traveling assassin. It’s a public diner, well-lit, in the middle of the lunch rush. There are a dozen witnesses, and he’s sitting in a booth facing the door. They aren’t a particularly normal-looking pair, but they fit in well enough. To passersby, they probably look like they’re on a date. 

“If this is a trap of some sort,” he warns, brandishing a butter knife threateningly.

Lila stares at the dull edge of his knife, as though he were a troublesome child. “I’d get _so_ many demerits for causing such a mess of things that it honestly would _not_ be worth it. I mean, _look_ at all these people.” She brandishes her fork, flicking a glob of her turnip greens onto the table. “I’d have to get rid of the lot of them as well, and as much fun as it’d be… _ugh,_ the paperwork. You can’t imagine how _annoying_ that is. My mother loved it, though, God knows why...” 

She doesn’t speak for a minute, tucking eagerly into her turnip greens. If nothing else, she seems genuine enough about being hungry. She'd ordered him the same, but he's lost his appetite, and is staring at his plate suspiciously. 

And he frowns. There’s something he’s been mulling over on the walk here, something that doesn’t make sense. 

“So what was all that then?” he asks. “That shit with the asylum? Why were you there?”

“Oh, well, when in Rome…”

He frowns.

She pouts. “I was working corrections duty. I was assigned you.”

“And that is…”

“Well, simply put, I’m in the business of rehabilitating the time continuum. Ensuring everything falls into its proper place. I get sent in to various times and various places, and I make sure things happen as they’re meant to. Understand?”

“Is that what Five did?”

Lila chews for a while. “Kind of.”

“And what were you doing with me? Why’d you lie for two weeks?”

“Well, you’re not supposed to be here, aren’t you? And the work’s so delicate, I had to be sure it was _you_ first, and then I had to get to extracting you. Ideally, you know, you’re not supposed to know we’re here at all.”

He frowns. No one had told Hazel and Cha-Cha that.

“What about those men? The ones that attacked me and Luther. You were there, weren’t you? What the hell was that?”

Lila sighs, a deep exhale of exasperation. “Conflicting contracts, _don’t get me started._ You know, it’s been an absolute _mess_ over at the Home Office since Number Five burned a bright and bloody path through the place. Wires are getting crossed _everywhere--”_

“What?”

Lila frowns, tilting her head. “How much did he tell you, about what he did with us?”

Diego thinks. He knows little of the Commission, in truth, only the borderline-nonsensical spiel Five had spewed out about days ago. He knows they’re a pack of time-traveling assassins. He knows they’re responsible for maintaining the apocalypse. He knows Five had worked for them, and that they’d sent two different sets of hitmen after them. 

“Number Five attacked the Home Office,” Lila says, her voice sharp with disdain, “He was brought in for a promotion, and he just _torched_ the place. He killed a lot of good hardworking people.” Her voice wobbles a bit. 

That… sounds _exactly_ like something Five would do, he’ll grant her that.

But there’s something else. His brother would have had a reason for doing it. After all, this is the organization that’d attacked him and his brothers at the Icarus, for trying to save the world. 

“You simply can’t trust Number Five, you know,” she says. “Always running off and causing trouble. I can’t believe they let him back in at all.”

Diego bites the inside of his cheek.

She’s right. The simple truth is that Five can’t be relied upon. He’d left them here. He keeps disappearing on them. He doesn’t know where Five is, what he’s up to. He could still have yet to pop in from 2019, or he could have been here for days and simply decided not to bother with the lot of them. 

But that’s besides the point. 

“What do you want with me?” he asks. Then, as an afterthought: “With us?”

“Why, to take you all home. Free of charge!” She’s smiling, too widely, like she has too many teeth. 

He crosses his arms. “And why are we so important? We don’t cause the apocalypse _here,_ do we?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lila waves her fork, “You don’t _belong_ here. None of your family does. You belong right back where you come from, in your proper place. And I dunno about an apocalypse, but if the lot of you stick around, you could end up causing undue damage to the timeline. I mean, you’re not just ordinary people, you’re the _Umbrella Academy!”_

_Oh, she’s heard about us?_

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! You’re kind of famous back at the Home Office. There’s your brother, of course, still the top ranked Corrections Agent, even given everything, at least until _I_ take his score, but now there’s your sister as well. The harbinger of the apocalypse, herself! And the _rest_ of you…”

Diego leans forward. “What about me?”

Lila smiles, carefully brushing her hair behind her ear, “Why, you’re extraordinary.” 

Diego swells. 

“And frankly,” her voice drops, like she’s a little embarrassed to be saying it at all: “I believe it. You were really impressive, when we broke out, you know. If things weren’t so topsy-turvy back at the office, I’d even ask about scouting you. We only recruit the best, you know.”

For a lightning-flash of a second, he thinks about it.

But then he blinks.

No, he has a job to do. He isn’t going to return to his family a failure. He just has to find Vanya and...

… And who better to help, really, than her? Than the time cop who knows exactly where his sister will be, who has something tucked under the table, between her feet, that might take them home when all’s said and done.

“Where’s my sister?”

She looks up at him, reaching down below the table, for that folder she’d flashed in front of him an hour ago. 

“I was hoping we’d get to that. Now, I have a _far_ better lead than you.”

He stares at the folder, right before him, and lifts a hand, to reach towards it, striking quick as a snake across the table, tugging it away from her skittishly, like it’ll burst into flame if he lets her hold onto it for more than a second.

He opens it. 

There are several pages of carefully typewritten information. Vanya’s name and age, her importance as the destroyer of the world. The circumstances of her arrival in Dallas, transported by one rogue agent, Number Five, with five other anomalies. 

And an address.

“I’m afraid your sister’s run into quite a bit of trouble. You see, she’s run afoul of the FBI.”

“What?”

“Read it yourself.”

He does. 

Vanya, if the report is to be believed, had been picked up by the government in the park he and Klaus and Ben had just been traipsing through, and is currently being interrogated on suspicion of being a Russian spy.

Diego squints suspiciously. 

“How do I know this is real? How do I know this isn’t all a load of bullshit, I mean, where do you even get this information from?”

“Well, our resources are _fantastic._ But really, I’m not trying to pull the wool over your eyes. I promise, you can go and confirm it for yourself. Bring me along, if you like. Or don’t.”

“And why are you so concerned with her?”

“Oh, weren’t you listening, Diego? I just told you: she’s an anomaly in the timeline, same as you. She’s got to be extracted and brought back to her proper time. That’s my new assignment, you see. It’s just…”

She clams up, blinking her doeish eyes and glancing nervously away.

“Just what?” He softens his voice. 

“It’s just, well, I’m not sure if I can do it on my own.” 

Oh, he _gets_ it: “You need my help.”

She glances up at him quickly, then away again, peering with intense feigned interest out the window. 

He’s got it. He’s got his path and his plan now: He has to find Vanya, to save her, to take her back to the family, to prove himself. He’s got her location right here in his hands, and he can go there, right now. He can do it, right now. 

And if he works with her, he’ll have secured their ticket home. 

Diego nods. Everything’s falling into place. He’s found someone who also wants his sister out of her captors’ clutches, someone who’s handed him his lead on a silver platter. He’ll help her retrieve his sister, he’ll show her how to infiltrate and extract a target, he’ll guide her through it the way leaders do, he’ll _prove_ himself… 

It's a tough call, and leaders make tough calls, so he makes it now.

“Alright,” he says, and she beams.

 _The enemy of my enemy is my friend,_ Diego thinks. 

She extends a hand, and he takes it.

* * *

When Vanya first awakens, it’s because of the angry pulsing of the welt in her forehead. The wound she’d sustained in the attack on the mansion had reopened, and it’s wrapped in itchy gauze.

Her first impulse is to reach up and scratch at it, but she can’t; her arms are leaden and heavy, especially around the wrist.

Vanya drifts backwards into sleep. It’s so hard, keeping her eyes open, and it’s so, so easy to just roll back into the warm space in the stiff pillow beneath her and burrow into it as well as she can.

She isn’t alone, when she peels her crusty eyes open next.

She’s in a room so bright it’s hard to see anything at all, so bright it makes her eye sockets throb, so bright it makes her roll her eyelids nearly shut, so she can peer at everything through her lashes. There are dark, swimming blobs everywhere, that eventually reshape themselves into furniture, into features. A chair, a desk, a thin bed, which she is lying in. There’s no window, but there’s a metal door, strangely thick, with a tiny glass window at eye level. A mirror, with her own pale face peering back at her, strangely clean.

Vanya had learned an old trick from Five, about mirrors. You had to press your finger just so against the glass, to look for a gap between your finger and its reflection; if there is no gap, then the mirror is two-way. It’s how she’d learned that the mirrors in the playroom they’d had as toddlers had been a set of windows in disguise.

She can’t get up, to go and check. Her hands are fastened to metal bars on the bed with heavy cuffs, bruising purple bands into her wrists.

She looks down at herself, and realizes she doesn’t know where her suit went, doesn’t remember taking it off. She’s in a scratchy teal uniform dress. It's hiked up just past her knees, and she can't reach down to replace the skirt. Someone had put her in it, someone had _touched_ her while she’d been asleep. Even her underwear feels different, which is a uniquely terrible sort of surprise. 

There’s a rustling at her bedside and Vanya remembers: yes, that’s it, that’s what woke her, there is a person here with her. 

It’s a nurse, she thinks. It’s a woman, in the white, tidy uniform of a nurse, so that’s what she must be. 

The nurse is preparing something by her bedside. She can’t tell what it is, only that it’s some sort of chemical. A medicine, maybe, for the wound on her head. 

How _had_ she hurt herself? 

Vanya frowns, thinking back to that night at the park, to staring intently at the water, and then seeing nothing at all.

Had she slipped?

Wait, the nurse is asking her something, and Vanya is still so groggy, she can hardly make it out.

Her name. The nurse is asking for her name, and before she can stop herself, she croaks out, “Vanya?”

“You don’t sound so sure.” She sounds a little amused.

It occurs to Vanya then, that it might be a very good idea to keep who she is as close to her chest as possible. Her family might be looking for her, and it would be safer if she were not to use her full name at whatever hospital this is. And besides, it would be difficult for a person to wrap their mind around the idea of a time traveler, she might be thought a liar, or…

Crazy.

Vanya tugs at her restraints.

Her mouth feels like it’s full of sand.

Is that where she is, a _mental_ hospital?

The nurse is cooing. Vanya peers up, taking in her face, which is unremarkable, save for the way her pale eyes look constantly skittish under red rims.

“It’s alright,” she’s saying, in the exact sort of sugary sweet tone Mom used right before she would massage a pill down Vanya’s throat. “It’s alright. Can you tell me what happened?”

“What do you mean?” Vanya croaks, then smacks her cracked lips together.

The nurse shoves a straw into her mouth. Vanya thinks she’s drinking water, but it tastes oily and awful. 

“Why, dear, you were found in the park a few days ago.”

_Days? How long have I been here?_

“You’d been knocked clean out. Can you tell me what happened? What you might’ve been doing there? The nice fellow who found you and brought you here said you were down by the river. Why were you there? Were you meeting someone, maybe?” 

There it is. Her way out. Her way to keep everything secret, to protect herself. 

“I don’t remember. I… I…” What’s the best way to put it?

Oh, she’s got it: “I think I have amnesia.”

The nurse stares at her, and something sours in her gaze. Suddenly, she looks a lot like Leonard did, when he realized she didn’t want to play Bonnie and Clyde with him anymore.

 _Oh,_ Vanya thinks, glancing down at what she’s wearing, over at the mirror-that-is-definitely-not-a-mirror. _I’m not in a hospital, am I?_

 _“Really?_ You expect us to believe _that?”_

Vanya tries to sit up.

The nurse’s hand clamps over her mouth, and there’s a sickly sweet chemical tang burning her nose and mouth, a smell she recognizes from her time attending her father in his household laboratory as chloroform.

It takes a while for chloroform to take effect. About five minutes, give or take. And for each and every one of those minutes, Vanya is squirming, bucking wildly, trying to twist her way out of the woman’s grip, to bite through the rag at her fingers.

She fails.

When Vanya next wakes, she looks down, and finds herself strapped to the chair she’s sitting in.

She’s in a room that she might’ve taken for an empty classroom, given the tile on the floors and the cheap fluorescent beams overhead, and the large windows. That is, were it not for the massive recording device sitting on the desk, beside a newspaper that tells her it is the eighteenth of November, 1963, and that in a few short days, President Kennedy will be arriving. Or the strange man, bleary-faced, with droopy gray eyes, smoking in front of her.

She has no idea who had taken her, only that she had been taken, only that this man is responsible. 

He is talking to someone in the room just behind her, asking about a dosage, whether it would be advisable to start with the electroshock, or work their way up to it.

She recognizes the language instantly: it’s Russian.

_Have I been kidnapped by Russians?_

Vanya thinks back, to what she knows about the sixties, to the Cold War, to the nuclear arms race, to the paranoia that had permeated society.

 _Is it possible,_ she wonders, _that I’ve been kidnapped by some sort of Russian sleeper cell? Were they even a thing, here? What would they even want from me?_

“... on earth _is_ it?” he is saying, his cigarette bobbing on his lower lip as he speaks, “It’s not dye, is it? You don’t think it’s some sort of condition? Why would it go white this early? Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Oh. He’s talking about her hair.

Vanya feels her face turning pink. She dips her head, trying to tug it behind her ears by using her shoulder to brush it back. It’s such a stupid thing, to feel self-conscious about. 

Then, the man smoking in front of her smiles, like a cat would upon cornering a mouse.

And he switches to perfect English.

“Well, isn’t _that_ interesting?”

He reaches down to his lap, and methodically closes a binder he’d had open, setting it next to the newspaper on the desk. She can see the seal emblazoned on it perfectly, which she is sure is exactly why he’d had it placed at such an angle. 

If what she’s seeing is to be believed, he’s from the FBI. 

And Vanya realizes: _It was a test._ _He was testing me, to see if I spoke Russian, to see if I understood him, and I’ve walked right into it._

Vanya thinks about it: She has dropped into Dallas seemingly out of midair, strangely dressed and without a scrap of identification. She has done so days before the President is coming to town. She’s left a trail of destruction in her wake, and she isn’t sure if they know she has powers, or if they simply think she’s a mad bomber. And now, she has just let it slip to them that she has a Russian name, and she has just proven that she understands the language. 

_They think I’m a spy, don’t they?_

She’s fucked. 

Vanya squirms against the restraints, but there are hands on her shoulders, her face, her chin, plucking at her eyelids, and there’s an awful burning in her eyes… eyes, _eyes,_ there are _eyes_ melting out of the ceiling, and the walls, blinking blearily at her and...

Unbeknownst to her, she has been dosed with pure L.S.D. 

Vanya can feel her senses drifting away from her. The maze inside her mind has gone blurry, the paths twisting and tangling like the gnarled roots of a dead tree, walls suddenly starred with eyes that catch her in a paralyzing glare. She can’t recall the way out, can’t recall what she’d even gone wandering inside to find. 

Her powers are sinking deep within her fast as the drug worms its way into her system. They’re out of reach now, as out of reach as they’d been when she’d been on her medication. 

_I am ordinary again,_ she realizes. _I am ordinary again, and I am trapped here, and no one will be coming for me._

It’s the last coherent thought Vanya has for a long, long time.


	4. turn me out and i'll wander

When Ben died, his father invited all the city’s most prominent reporters, politicians and celebrities to the house, to witness the unveiling of the bronze statue of him, grim and resolute and forever-masked, in the courtyard. There, he had reported the cause of his death as a casualty of a mission gone horribly wrong.

He lied. 

Ben isn’t sure exactly, if it was his death, or the lie they all told each other about it, that broke the family. When he was younger, or rather, newer to being dead, he liked to think it was the former, but he’s got more perspective now, and his ego has faded enough with time to acknowledge the enormity of that deception, and how corrosive it must have been, to have to repeat it over and over in front of a swarm of hungry reporters. 

Sometimes, he catches himself believing it. The moment of impact starts to warp and twist, like the pages of a book submerged in water, with trails of ink spiraling off into nothing. 

He catches himself confusing it all, staring down at himself and wondering why he isn’t in his mission uniform, or why there aren’t any marks on his body. 

Or he’ll start to confuse the moment he’d realized exactly what had happened.

Right now, he remembers.

The screaming had started above him, and that moment of pure vindictive release had curdled instantly, turning to ash and scattering. He’d gone pounding up the stairs, shouldered his way to the front of the tangle of bodies in the door. He’d stared down at himself, and then, all he could think was, _what did I_ do _to myself?_

He knows now, exactly what he’d done. He’s had twelve years to think about it, to take those moments and turn them over in his mind and obsess over them.

He’s grateful for Klaus. For his noise, for the _distraction_ of him.

Thinking about what happened is a terrible trap, a sea of quicksand that he gets the sense that so many ghosts sink into. You get lost inside your own pain, and the world shrinks until it suffocates you, until you give your mind over to it and you’re left shuffling through the dark murky world forever.

Klaus had spared him that, and the years they’ve spent together are ones he wouldn’t trade for anything. Years spent as his second, invisible shadow, contenting himself with long stretches of silence, and brief spells of warmth in rehab, when Klaus has no choice but to acknowledge him, or else lightning-strikes of companionship, in between highs.

He hadn’t had much of a choice, being bound to the unknowable, unwritten laws that ghosts are bound to, but even if he had, he knows for a fact that he’d never walk into that light.

He sees it sometimes, in the corner of his eye, shining the way Ben imagines the sun might, if one were staring up at it from the bottom of the ocean: a faint pale glow, rippling unsteadily, like it might drift away into the dark and leave you blind.

And the world of the dead, or at least, the in-between world of the dead who cannot or will not move on, is so very dark; even in broad daylight, it seems like Ben is looking at everything through a thick veil that blurs everything at the edges, washing all the colors out and making the shadows sharp, the light dull and bluish and watery. If there were a design to it, Ben would consider this feature highly intentional, to force them all towards the light. 

But that’s alright, you see, even when it does, Ben won’t be lost. 

The thing about Klaus that makes him so instantly noticeable to ghosts, is that he possesses a sort of shine to him, a barely-perceptible luminance that clings to his skin and hovers about it, like the air around a candle flame. It takes a minute to see him, but once you do, you can spot him flickering from far away, and like a moth, you can’t help but be drawn in by that light, that light so like the one out of reach to you, or that you’ve otherwise rejected.

And when the ghosts see him, when they recognize that bobbing blue flicker for what it is, they come swarming, like hungry sharks, to encircle it. 

Ben had made it a point to keep watch over him; that thing inside of him may be dormant now, uninterested in a ghostly host unless said host is being conjured, but it has a weight to it, that in this world between worlds, others are able to recognize implicitly. 

Klaus is constantly in a state of being circled by sharks, but Ben is something far older, far larger, and they maintain a respectful distance from him. 

Ben has taken upon himself the task of guardianship. It isn’t something he’s been asked to do, but something he’d chosen, something he’d decided had to be done. He keeps watch over Klaus while he sleeps, he watches his back when he slips into spaces he shouldn’t be, he urges him to stop using, he…

Well, he leans against the side of a building, as Klaus runs a dirt-rimmed fingernail along an outdated map as he scours Oak Lawn for hardware stores. 

He leans back, and he watches Klaus obsess over Perfect Dave, just like he’s been stuck doing for the past ten months. Ten wonderful, miserable months Ben has spent third-wheeling his favorite person, as he sucked face in a foxhole in a war he shouldn't even have been fighting in the first place. Ten awful months that had swept in and destroyed the wonderful balance Ben had found in his afterlife with Klaus, that knocked him from his place as the most important person in his life and rendered him very, very ignorable.

Suddenly, it hadn't been just the two of them anymore. It wasn't Ben-and-Klaus, but Ben-and-Klaus and Dave, and then Ben and Klaus-and-Dave. Suddenly, Klaus was tugging away, and heading somewhere he wouldn't let Ben follow. Suddenly, even in those long stretches of clarity between his highs, Klaus was ignoring him. And he _hates_ being ignored. He hates being reminded of how Klaus is the sun around which he has to orbit, and that he's nothing but a dull satellite, so easy to forget about, or to fling into the depths of wild space. Suddenly, he was all alone in that dreamlike darkness. 

He doesn’t get it. He _really_ doesn’t get it. 

_What’s ten months compared to twelve years?_ he keeps thinking.

Apparently, to Klaus, a lot more. Apparently, Dave is enough to stay in the middle of an active war zone for, enough to risk being shot every day for. 

Apparently, Dave is enough to stay sober for. Not like Ben is.

Ghosts aren’t supposed to feel, he’s pretty sure, but he’s long ago come to realize that had to do with physical sensation. Emotions are fair game.

It sucks. It really fucking sucks. 

But he’s right, is the thing. Ben’s right, that this is all a waste of time. 

After all, look at them, wandering around Dallas with just the clothes on their backs, crossing off storefront after storefront, leaving their family high and dry in pursuit of a fantasy. 

_If you think you’re off your high, you’re shitting yourself,_ Ben thinks bitterly as Klaus charges into the thirty-fifth store they’ve searched thus far. _You’re just on another sort of drug, and you’re about to crash._

He will. Of course he will. He’ll crash, and he’ll fall, and then Ben will pick him up and pull him out of this rut, because that’s them, you see, that’s Klaus and Ben, that’s what they do.

Klaus is making a grand show of browsing aisle after aisle of bland paint, and Ben’s about ready to lean in and pull an I-told-you-so, and suggest they do something else, like, say, maybe, getting the hell on the bus and high-tailing it back out to Diego, or all the way up north to Dad, to where Luther’s going. 

But then, the voice, plucking up from around the corner, asking if Klaus needs any help.

The warm, deep, twangy voice that Ben is far too familiar with. It’s younger, a little higher, but still definitely Dave. 

Klaus has found him.

* * *

There’s one more set of people Five had thought to enlist the help of, for the important task that’s ahead of him, one more set of people that a deep dive into the recent stack of anomaly reports towering ten feet high in one particular Temps Commission basement office had yielded. 

He had stumbled across their names by mistake, more than anything; just a quick cursory graze through their file, and the explosion of a familiar name in an unfamiliar place that’d left a mark on his mind.

This pair, Five had decided not to report to his overseer. 

He hadn’t seen a point, really; Carmichael had allowed the extra days, for the purposes of planning and studying the terrain, but he didn’t care much about where Five would stay in the leadup to the execution of his plot. 

There’s also the tactical advantage they bring. If they have what they surely _must_ have, if they are in fact fifty-six years out of time, then he might have found a loophole, or a path home that won’t require a leap of faith on the part of his power. 

And, well. He thought it’d be unjustifiably cruel, to raise a concern about their location. A long, quiet life with one’s love is a gift only truly understood for its value by those cursed with unquiet lives all alone, and after everything, the Rofas are most certainly deserving of one such life together. 

So, Five had quietly tucked the anomaly report listing the location of Hazel and Agnes Rofa into his jacket, and quietly shredded it at the earliest opportunity. And he had also patted himself on the back, pleased that his antics at the Home Office had created such a massive backlog that the likes of such an anachronistic couple were able to go unseen for so long.

Five, Luther and Allison find them in a pleasant little house in a suburb in Waco, and they arrive on their doorstep unannounced. 

Hazel is the one to open the door, staring with vague recognition at Luther and Allison, before resting his eyes on Five, and muttering, “Oh, hell, what is it _now?”_

They are invited inside, nonetheless.

Hazel’s gone gray, since Five has last seen him, and his wife, who Five recognizes vaguely as the woman who’d served him at Griddy’s, has become quite frail and bird-like in her old age, but she’s still delightfully energetic, and surprisingly open to the thought of three fellow time travelers dropping in from out of the blue, and staying for a few days. 

It takes Luther and Allison a minute longer, to get used to the idea that the bear of a man who’d had his hand around Allison’s throat the week the world exploded has settled into such a soft life, or that he might be so calm about seeing them now.

But they manage. A lot of things have happened to them, and that fight seems like ancient history now. They settle in, and carry on.

“The years fly by,” Hazel says to Five, sitting out on the porch swing with him, watching the clouds roll across a bright blue sky. “I turned fifty-four last week, can you believe that?”

“You’re almost of an age with me,” Five replies, smiling a little pompously at the thought that he is still the senior of the two.

They chuckle, two old men sharing a private joke. 

On the first night they spend there, they sleep on the floral-patterned couches in the Rofas’ small living room, respectfully deigning not to touch the collection of porcelain birds adorning the coffee table and the neat little bookshelves. 

Five has trouble sleeping. He stares at the soft silvery light falling through the window, and thinks about how completely they’d dropped into the past, so seamlessly they hadn’t caused so much as a ripple.

His younger self would’ve thought them immensely self-centered, for not using their vantage as people of the future to attempt to adjust its course in the past.

Now, old as Five is, he _gets_ it, when he, Hazel and Luther are sitting out on the porch, and Hazel’s tilting his head at the sound of music leaking from the house, and says, “Love’s _nice.”_

Now, old as he is, he peers over at the door to the bedroom, closed, and then to his right, to the larger couch, where Luther, too tall, has hooked his knees over one of the arms. He has an arm around Allison, who has curled atop him, and the two of them are making soft peaceful noises. Five looks at them, at the umbrella branded on the forearm Allison has allowed to drop off the side of the couch and hang loosely, fingers brushing the carpet. And he thinks that it’s not selfish at all, to want to live quietly after years of pain. 

His heart aches for such a thing, and he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get it. He just knows that he wants it so intensely that his chest aches.

They stay at the Rofas’ for several days, and they’re given permission to use their home as a sort of meeting place, should they get separated after the mission they’re tasked with completing. 

They assume the roles Hazel had insisted upon placing on them, ones that would explain their arrival to the neighbors that Agnes has lunch with every Tuesday, those of a long-estranged son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, in town for a short while. 

(Upon hearing their temporary cover, Allison had stared, long and hard, at Five, and rasped: “Clearly, you take after his side of the family.”)

(And upon seeing their neighbors’ reaction to her fake daughter-in-law, Agnes Rofa decided that she would not, in fact, be going to lunch with said neighbors ever again. Then, she had gone out and passive-aggressively uprooted their rosebush.) 

Here, among people who understand the time from which they came, they are relieved of the heavy burden of putting on the airs of people of the time. Allison tugs her skinny jeans and T-shirt and sports bra out from the bottom of her suitcase, wincing at the deep creases in them, and wears them around the house freely, and Luther is finally able to talk to someone about the current progress of the space race.

And here, there is at last time to recover. They treat their recent scrapes and bruises, and Allison recalls all the strict rules she’d abided by in the house, the ones designed to ensure that her voice would always be in tip-top shape, the old rituals she’d spurned the moment she landed in California, and had taken up while boarding with Odessa. Now, with access to an actual kitchen for the first time in days, she takes them up again, and resumes making the foul-tasting special drinks and undergoing the ridiculous voice exercises (Luther learns quite a bit about the value of a poker face, when he’s caught cracking up at one particular exercise in which Allison buzzes her lips and trills her voice like a cartoon fish). 

It’s a welcome break for Allison and Luther, but not one at all for Five. He’s pouring over his plans, scouring them over and over, filling pages and pages of notes calculating variables, feeling his thoughts fly away from him the harder he tries to gather them. He’s been in a state of sprinting for days, and now, standing still, he feels his mind still carried forward by the inertia; sure, they’re not cramped in a car in a constant state of motion, but death’s still hanging above them all, and the Commission might have eyes on them already, and their deadline’s only getting closer, and closer, and…

And he needs to stop obsessing over this. 

He’ll find a loophole. It’s somewhere, he just needs to tease it out and tug on it and find a way to escape with everything. He can do it. He can do it. He can do it.

They'll find it, and they'll thread themselves through it, and they'll fix it, and then they'll get back to Vanya.

They tell him about her. About the way she’d slashed at them with a knife made of sound, how she’d fled, and they wonder about how on earth they’re ever going to appeal to her, when she’s so afraid, and far too dangerous to approach.

About how through being here, they’ve abandoned her--

“--We _haven’t,”_ hisses Five urgently, “My hand’s been forced.”

Allison nods. She hates that she’s left Vanya alone like this, but she’d been faced with two terrible choices, and she’d known that ultimately, someone would still be looking for Vanya, that someone might be able to get through to her in her absence. Had she not gone for Luther, he might not have survived at all. And now, she’s going to help Five with whatever this ends up being. The thought that he and Luther could be obliterated from existence is one she refuses to entertain.

 _I am going to help,_ she thinks determinedly, _and we are going to save the both of you. We are going to save you, and then we are going to save Vanya, and then we are going to save Claire and the world._

She sighs, rubbing the heel of her hand in circles on her forehead. They have to do so _much._

“And I’ve only involved you,” Five continues, “Because you’re a part of this too, because you deserve to know what’ll happen if I don’t succeed.”

“Because we’re…” Luther can’t even say it.

“Yeah.”

It’s so _strange._

The Hargreeves siblings know a bit about their origin, only so much as their father had deigned to tell them. They know they’d been born on the same day, at the same time, in different corners of the world, to different mothers who’d never expected their arrival. The possibility of some of them being blood siblings was always there, they suppose, but it’d simply never crossed their minds.

“Of _course_ Dad never told us,” Five snarls. 

“You’re _really_ my twin brother?” Luther says, mulling it over slowly, staring at Five’s features, then over at the mirror, at his own, and trying to find points of commonality between them, but utterly failing.

A part of him still believes it’s a joke of some sort, but the people Five is here at the behest of don’t seem like the sort to pull a prank of this kind. He keeps staring at the grainy black-and-white image of his mother, once a vague idea floating in the back of his mind and now suddenly right here in front of him, clear as day.

“I know, I know. I’d have preferred Allison.”

Allison snorts.

“I like to think my intelligence is genetic,” he defends, half-joking.

“Absorbed in the womb,” mutters Allison. 

They laugh, genuinely, and for a moment, it feels like the sun's broken through the clouds.

But then they’re back to it. There’s just no time for warm fluffy feelings about brotherhood, not with a loaded gun to their existence. 

It’s three days to the day of action, and they’re gathered in the warm yellow kitchen, figuring out the parameters of their mission. Five has the folder with the brief out before them, and they’re pouring over the itinerary, ebbing and flowing from moments of cooperation and surges of argument. 

“In two days,” explains Five, “The president lands. He’ll head to Hotel Texas in Fort Worth around midnight, where he’ll stay in Suite 850. The next day, he’ll speak in the ballroom, then he’ll be on the road to Dealey.”

“Where…” Allison mimes a gunshot: _boom._

“Yeah.” Five mimics her. _Boom._ “That’s around twelve-thirty. He’s rushed to Parkland Memorial, maybe he’s breathing when he gets there, maybe he isn’t; the sources here kind of vary on that, goes to show you how fucking reliable Commission info is… Anyway. He’s dead on the table by one. Or at least, that’s what’s _supposed_ to happen.”

Allison nods thoughtfully.

“So… Lee Harvey Oswald _doesn’t_ kill him?” Luther frowns.

“Well. He tries to. But the shots he lands aren’t fatal. At least, that’s what I was told.” 

“And you…”

“I make sure that they are. Or, my past self was _going_ to.”

“But instead you left?” asks Allison.

“For 2019, yes.”

“But he’s _dead_ in our timeline,” Luther stares at the typewritten page, “That means _someone_ does it, someone kills him, someone who isn’t _you.”_

“Was it us?” wonders Allison. 

Five frowns. 

He’s considered it, the idea that they might be taking part in a stable time loop. But he’d ultimately dismissed it; the mission calls for Five to stop himself from time-traveling, and this current incarnation of him, trapped in a teenage body, is still here. So clearly, they must be making a change to the timeline. 

He shrugs. “Doubtful. I think someone else must’ve been assigned the assassination in my absence. With all the hell that’s going on back at Main Headquarters, I suppose the guy they have on this detail got overbooked.”

It’s a holey explanation, but it’s one they accept, and it’s better than nothing. So Five clings to it. Far be it from him, to wonder about a detail that small. They just need to focus on what’s next. Time’s running out, and he still hasn’t found his way out of this, and if he just keeps looking, he’ll find it. He must find it, is the thing; either they're about to make a permanent change to the timeline, or there's a way out of this that won't lead in Five obliterating himself, and he just isn't _seeing_ it yet.

He’s keeping that last bit of information from them, about what exactly will happen when they correct the mission, should the way out not dawn on him. It’ll be a lot easier, to keep them in line, if they don’t know what he knows about where this mission is headed.

His past self hasn’t even landed in 1963 yet, and he’s still looming large ahead of them. They’re going to have to contend with him, no matter what.

Which means, he’s going to have to take point on this. If he steers them into the right place, they won’t question him. They won’t get in the way, if Five has to go through with it after all.

“Alright, I’ve thought it through, and I’m going to divide the both of you up. You’ll be Red Team, Luther, and you’re going to be on lookout duty. You’ll be Blue Team, Allison, and I’m putting you on crowd control--”

“--Wait, why do we need team names? There’s only two of us.”

“Luther, don’t fight me on this.”

“I’m sorry, I just… Five, this plan makes _no_ sense, you see that right?”

Five clenches his teeth, swallowing an outburst. 

Luther doesn’t need to know. Neither does she. Five can carry this weight, all alone. 

“I’m going to have to ask you to defer to me on this mission, Luther. It’s too important; if we fail, the both of us will be erased from existence."

Luther grimaces. Five keeps repeating himself, twisting around and around the same points, like a snake eating its tail.

"And you’ve never done anything quite like this," he continues, "But I have. See, we’re dealing with an opponent the likes of which you’ll have never encountered; a precision machine with one goal in mind: killing. He is an instrument of death, he’s--”

Allison reaches across the table, and tugs Five’s coffee mug away from him.

“Your past self,” she finishes.

“Yes,” he scowls, snatching his mug back. 

“We avoid him?” Allison asks. 

Five stares at her for a moment, calculating something.

“Yes.”

Allison glares at him, but doesn’t voice any more dissent. There's a fuse attached to Five, she's realizing, and she doesn't want to know what happens if it's lit.

 _He's terrified,_ she realizes, _And he's trying to hide it._

Luther stares down at the order. Ordinarily, he knows he’d balk at an assassination mission, especially one of this sort.

In the short time the Umbrella Academy had been truly active, they’d never been sent on one. They’d killed, of course, but it’d been robbers and rapists and masked villains who were trying to kill them right back. They’d killed, because they were on the right side, because they were good and their opponents were bad, because their father, who knew far better than they, was noble enough to make those distinctions for him, the ones Luther could never make without losing nights of sleep, or suffocating under the weight of his conscience (Up until recently, Luther hadn’t given much thought to how they’d been put in those situations in the first place to goad their combatants into having no option _but_ to try and kill them).

So he’s made his peace with killing, so long as it’s killing someone who tried to kill him first.

But assassination missions are different: they require planning, they require intent. Assassination missions aren’t fights where one’s opponent stands a chance of walking away. They leave a pit in his gut that just doesn’t dissipate. 

But this one will be different: it is the past, and Luther knows what happens, after Kennedy dies. He knows that things work out, ultimately. And he knows that if this doesn’t go through, he and Five will never exist. 

_It’s okay,_ he keeps telling himself. _It’s okay, that we’re doing this. It’s okay._

But there are still some things about Five’s plan that just don’t add up. There’s something he can tell that he’s withholding from them, something that’s weighing on him, filling him with a scattered, nervous energy that leaks from him and has the room on edge.

“Why are we even headed to the Plaza?” Luther asks, “Can’t we just do it earlier? I mean, we know where he’ll be.” He points to the itinerary.

Five sighs. “The idea is that we have to make as small a ripple as possible. He has to get assassinated by gunshot, and he has to be shot _there.”_

“Why?”

Five’s quiet for a moment.

“It simply must be done,” Five finally replies woodenly, gritting his teeth.

And then they're back to arguing, turning circles and circles around the same course, no closer to an answer.

* * *

Ben’s decided to wait outside. 

It's so weird, looking over his shoulder and not seeing him.

Klaus is pretty sure that he’s angry with him. 

_First Diego, now you? Honestly. What is it with you all?_

Well. He knows what it probably is. 

Ben wants to be corporeal. He wants to be seen, and to touch, and to be touched. And Klaus is the only way he can get it, and he won’t do it. 

Part of why Klaus isn’t conjuring Ben every five minutes is that it’s a sincerely draining act, that leaves him groggy and light-headed.

But that’s not all of it. That’s just the excuse he keeps falling back on, the one he clings to whenever he starts to feel guilt gnawing into his belly. 

Privately, he admits it: He doesn’t want to share Ben. 

In the twelve years they’ve been together, Klaus has become quite dependent on him. They hadn’t been great friends as children, but after his death, after the family imploded and everyone went their separate ways, they’d really come to bond, to develop a deep, wonderful sort of companionship. Klaus can’t count on the sun to shine, or his body to survive whatever he’s pumping it full of, but he can always count on Ben. 

He can always expect to see Ben over his shoulder. He can always know that when he rolls over on his cot in rehab, he’ll see a solemn, bluish face staring back at him, ever-awake, ever-watchful. He can always hear his voice in his ear, suggesting which movie they should see, asking about road trips, about getting some book and turning the pages every now and then so he can read it. He can always expect the inevitable _listen, Klaus, you have to stop, you’re gonna overdo it, please, you don’t want to end up like--_

He shakes loose of that thought, like a dog shakes itself free of the water clinging to his fur. It’s that thing, the thing they’ve agreed to never talk about, breaching up from his subconscious and rearing its ugly head again, and he’s going to have to whack it down again. 

The point is, that Klaus is very aware that he is the center of Ben’s universe. That he’s the most important person in his life. And he likes that very much. He likes this routine they’ve developed, he likes knowing he will never be alone. He likes the certainty of it. 

But now, with the revelation of that deeper level to his power, that center of gravity has shifted; suddenly, Ben doesn’t need him to interact with the world anymore. Suddenly, other people can swoop into their routine and carry him away, and leave Klaus alone. 

_After all, if he can talk to the rest of the family, then why would he ever want to hang around me?_

He’s safeguarding himself, is what he’s doing. He’s being proactive, the way Dad had always said he should be, in preparing for his problems. He can see the moment Ben gets tired of him and decides to fuck right off into the light coming around the corner with its high beams on, and he needs to be ready for it. He needs to burn this bridge before Ben can, because if he sets fire to it himself, then it can’t take him by surprise, then it’ll hurt less.

And besides, Dave’s alive. He’d been dead for a week or two, but now he’s back, and he’s alive, and _he’s right here, in the store with me,_ _and he’s alive._

Ben’s not pleased with him for a lot of reasons, but this is most certainly one of them.

Klaus knows exactly how selfish he’s being, running off on the family again, chasing another high, but this one is different. This one won’t kill him, this one isn’t like the one that’s been hanging over the two of them like the Sword of Damocles for twelve years, swinging during every conversation, flashing ominously whenever Klaus catches himself staring at him a little too long. 

This one is burdened by death, it’s true, but it’s a death that had nothing to do with him, that he can never ever worry was his fault. Dave had died, and he had gone straight into the light, and there is no guilt to wade through before he can begin to approach what they are to each other, not like the quagmire he and Ben are up to their waists in. 

The fact is that Dave is good, Dave is safe, Dave is easy, and sometimes, it’s nice to go with the easy option. It’s nice to bum around on lookout duty and flirt with the pretty lady ghost while his siblings dodge gunfire a room over. It’s nice to take a drag from his blunt and watch the lantern-eyed spectres trailing him wisp away like mist in a strong gust of wind. 

It’s okay, that he isn’t being a hero. Saving the world has never, ever been his thing, so he’s approached the problem of Vanya, and the problem of their stranding in the past with a considerably more detached sense of urgency than the rest of his family. 

There’s nothing that’s really _his_ in the future. He doesn’t have a kid, or a house, or a job, or a responsibility, or a care in the world, and hell, he’s been in the past before. He’s been in the _sixties_ before, and all in all, it went pretty great for him. Sure, he’d gotten shot at, but he’s been shot at in the future too. And sure, he’d lost someone, but he’d loved them first. 

And that someone is here, in the past, alive and breathing and you know what, Klaus doesn’t exactly love the sixties, but he’ll tolerate it. He’ll learn to like it, if it means that he gets to live a long-enough life here, with that someone. 

He’d imagined that life, on the bus ride out to Oak Lawn, on the meandering wander through the streets searching for the store whose name is slipping his mind. 

Maybe he’ll stay here, in Dallas, maybe he’ll get a house or an apartment. 

Or a cat, he’d like a cat, one of those weird designer ones that freak people out, that look like fuzzy little aliens. _Are they a thing yet? When did people decide to fuck up the cat gene pool so much that they got those little fuckers, and why are those little monuments to forced feline incest still so aesthetically pleasing?_

He almost asks Ben, before he catches himself, swallowing the words quickly.

… Anyway.

Maybe he’ll move to New York, or even just visit. Nina Simone’s alive now, she’s performing in clubs all across the city, she’s just starting to take off and has no idea how big she’ll get, and maybe this is his chance to see her. Maybe Dave’ll come along, maybe he’ll finally be able to sell him on how she’s far superior to the likes of Loretta Lynn, or whatever twangy country crap he’d kept trying to sell Klaus on. 

Maybe he’ll go to the movies, not the campy spy thrillers he always humors for Ben’s sake, but the trippy science-fiction ones Dave’s always talking about, the ones that take a whole university lecture’s worth of backstory to even begin to understand, the explanations so long-winded and tedious that Klaus loses track of who’s who in _Dune_ by the third minute in, but _man,_ Dave had such a _light_ in his eyes when he’d go on and on about it... 

Point is: Klaus is gonna be just fine here. 

He’s going to be _happy,_ even. 

He’s going to round this aisle of miscellaneous tools, and he’s going to look at the man behind the counter, and he’s going to smile, and Dave won’t recognize him yet, but that instant understanding they’d had when Klaus had dropped from the sky and into his lap is going to bubble up again, and now their roles will be reversed, how poetic, he’ll be the one guiding Dave through the past, and while this isn't _his_ Dave, he's still--

Klaus rounds the corner, and lays eyes on Dave.

 _Oh,_ he thinks immediately, _he’s… younger._

He’d known, of course, that he would be. Dave had been twenty-seven when Klaus knew him, so he’d be about twenty-two here, which, alright, bit of a gap there, he’ll admit, but he can work with it, it’s far from the largest age gap Klaus has ever engaged in.

Klaus takes one step, then another, across the store.

There’s no flicker of recognition in Dave’s eyes, and Klaus knows there wouldn’t be one, but he still can’t help but feel this sudden flare of disappointment, when he tells him his name and the memories don’t suddenly come flooding into Dave’s mind.

When Dave’s eyes look him up and down, taking in the oddness of his clothes, the quickness with which Klaus leans in towards him across the counter, it’s like he’s retreating into himself, like he doesn’t just not know who Klaus is, but like he’s trying to hide in plain sight.

They’re making small talk about paint colors, such an inane topic, but he’s clinging to it, because he just doesn’t have any idea how to _speak_ to him. 

So. Fuck it. He goes with the direct approach.

“Look, it’s going to sound real weird, but hear me out: I’m a time traveler.”

Dave blinks. “Alright, I wasn’t really expecting that.”

“Yeah, listen. It sounds unbelievable, but I am. And I’m here for you." 

Dave snorts. “Oh, don’t tell me, you want me to take you to my leader?”

“No, that’s aliens. I’m not an alien, I’m a time traveler. As in, I’m from the future. I’m from fifty years in the future, and I’m here for _you.”_

His hand’s on the counter, and Klaus slowly reaches out, brushing his fingers tentatively across Dave’s, the way they would when they were--

Dave tears his hand away, staring at him like he’d grown a second head.

Oh.

Oh, right. 

They’re in the sixties. 

And Dave doesn’t know that he likes men yet.

The realization knocks the wind from Klaus’s chest. 

Dave had told him about how he’d figured it out, while they were on leave in Saigon, that first night they’d kissed, their heads heavy with clouds of alcohol and their inhibitions loosened. He’d told him that it’d come to him slowly, softly, over a long period of years, but he hadn’t really _known_ until he’d been in the army only a few years ago.

 _A few years ago_ in 1968, now translating to: _not yet._

Shit. Shit, oh _shit._

Dave’s asking him to kindly leave. To get off the store property right now.

He doesn’t know, and from what Klaus knows about his family, he isn’t going to be open-minded about it, not exactly, for quite a while.

Klaus has been knocked off-balance by the realization. That’s the excuse he tells himself when he feels his feet shuffling out automatically. The rug’s been ripped out from under him and the door's slammed shut on his grand vision of his future in the past, and he just doesn’t…

No, there’s one thing he can do.

Klaus pulls the tags from around his neck, slapping them down on the counter.

He gives the name of the diner down the street, where he’ll be waiting.

“Come find me,” he says, “Please.”

* * *

Vanya’s being held in a nondescript administrative building, in the middle of Northwest Dallas. According to Lila, the top half of the building has been repurposed for a company that does not exist, but that instead serves as a cover for a covert interrogations facility. Diego never would have found the place on his own. 

Diego’s good at stealth, at walking with light footfalls and stealing around corners, at navigating lightless halls and tricking security cameras, but he’s never infiltrated a place quite like this, where the stakes are quite this high. 

Lila, it seems, has. 

It takes them a few days to work their way in subtly, at her request, so they might hide in plain sight, making their faces familiar enough to those who belong in the building that they might be able to walk right down the halls and not raise a single eyebrow.

It scrapes at what little patience Diego has, but he humors the idea.

And the thing is, it works. 

They make their way in, and no one says a thing. Lila adopts the tidy skirted garb of a secretary, and he assumes the bland uniform of a security guard, and no one so much as looks at them. Probably for reasons unrelated to their disguises, but, well: The sixties. 

The point is, they’re inside. And they’re learning the layout of the building, which hall connects to which, before they can act on any escape plans. 

They make for a small, dim room filled with files first of all. There, they find where Vanya’s being kept, the records of her interrogations, the procedure with which the FBI is keeping her under supervision.

There, Lila taps away at a typewriter, editing a schedule just enough to sneak Diego into the rotation of guards responsible for feeding her. 

There, Diego stares at the transcripts of Vanya’s interviews, tugging at the chain around his neck. They think she’s a Russian agent, one sent to place charges across the city, to be set off when the president arrives in a day, but she’s been so unresponsive, they don’t yet have full confirmation. 

He isn’t sure if they know about her extraordinariness yet, if the sedation she’s being kept under is for her power specifically, or just the standard for suspected spies. Regardless, the knowledge that she’s currently on a sedative powerful enough to knock out a thoroughbred has thrown a wrench in their plan. It’s going to take longer than either of them would like.

Lila especially is put-off by the news that they’ll have to wait. She’s hungry to get this done, to get it over with. Too hungry, for someone who ought to have all the time in the world.

Diego peers over at her.

She doesn’t have the briefcase anymore. She’d handed it off to some agent or another at the fancy hotel she’s been put up in by the Commission, something about a shortage requiring an extremely cautious use of the technology. Something Five did.

She talks a _lot_ about Five, and there’s something tinny in the pitch of her voice whenever he does; he can’t pin down exactly what it is, but it bothers him.

Her room, he’d noted, had been nothing like the shabby motel room Hazel and Cha-Cha had been relegated to. It’d been sprawling and luxurious, with a suite attached for him. Whoever she is, she’s in very high regard, as far as the Commission’s concerned. 

Which makes him wonder: “What do you get, for getting us all home?”

Lila smiles. “What do you care? You get to go home.”

He holds his tongue after that, staring at her back.

But she senses his unease. She’s very good at that, he’s realizing; she’s always quick to tell if he’s angry or confused or uncertain. She turns, clicks her nails on the desk, and grins.

“It simply must be done,” Lila says, peering at the blueprint of the floor of the building on which Vanya is held, tracing the shape of the cell lovingly with a red-tipped finger. 

Then she’s finished, and they’re on to the next stage in their plan.

Vanya’s fed twice a day. It’s always the same, a tray of bland food with no utensils.

Diego knows exactly why she’s not allowed a knife, or a fork, or a spoon. He isn’t sure if it’s just a precaution, or if she’s done something. Either way, the thought makes his gut clench. 

He’s to feed her, at the end of the day. Lila’s found him the necessary documentation, and has guided him through the blueprint, showing him exactly where he’ll need to walk to find his way to his sister.

And now, he’s on his way. 

When he’s in her cell, he won’t be interrupted. He’d looped the cameras, and Lila will be keeping watch in the observation room. 

It’s easy. It’s too easy, it’s so easy he’s expecting Lila to leap around the corner and surprise him with a sucker punch, but nothing happens.

Everything should be fine, but his palms are slick and his heart’s slamming in his chest. 

Diego doesn’t actually know what he expects. 

Vanya had been furious the last time he’d seen her, and her anger scares him in a way he’s just not used to. It’s not just that it was mousy little Vanya, suddenly unleashing a hurricane’s worth of power upon them. It’s that Diego’s used to letting loose rage in quick, careful slices, but he doesn’t quite know what to do when he’s on the receiving end of it. Especially not a hammer of fury, bearing down on him with the force of a thunderstorm.

In truth, he’s never been sure about what to do with Vanya. He isn’t like Five or Allison, determined to save her at any cost. He isn’t like Luther, ready to try, so long as doing so won’t cause more harm. He isn’t even like Klaus, willing to do just about anything, so long as everyone else is there to pitch in.

He doesn’t want her to die. But he doesn’t know if she can be helped, either. He isn’t chasing her down for her own sake, but for his, for the respect the family will give him if he returns with her under his arm.

But when he actually considers Vanya, and the likelihood of taking her back, he keeps thinking _too far gone,_ over and over. 

It’s like with Mom, he realizes. It’s a _lot_ like it was with Mom.

He thinks of her, of how he’d decided to switch her off, how _wrong_ he’d been to do so; Mom had gotten better, after all. She’d been up and moving around and animated in a way he’s never seen her before, in just a matter of days.

Diego bites the inside of his cheek. He shouldn’t have shut her down, he was an idiot for doing so. He’d done it because he simply couldn’t have been bothered to wait. 

_All it would have taken was time,_ he thinks.

And if Mom had been saved, if _Grace_ had been saved, then Vanya can be helped too.

Her door’s before him now. He peers through the little window, and into the little room she’s being kept in. 

Vanya’s there, curled up in a bed. Her back’s to him, and her knees are coiled up to her chest, her tangled hair shining in the dim, sick glow of the fluorescents. 

She doesn’t look feral or ferocious, she isn’t clawing at the window in a murderous rage.

She looks small.

Diego had thought he’d feel pride rushing through him when he’d found her, when he’d beaten the rest of his family to her. Instead, he feels like he might keel over and vomit.

The key scrapes in the lock.

And the door creaks warningly as he presses his shoulder into it, and works his way inside.

He enters.

Vanya’s back is still to him. Her chest is rising and falling steadily, in a rhythm that reminds him of sleep. 

Given what’s in what he’s about to feed her, maybe she won’t be able to wake up at all. 

But he has to try, so Diego sets the tray down on the table next to the bed, casting a quick, suspicious glance towards the two-way mirror, and leans down, to rest his elbows on the corner of the mattress.

“Hey,” he says softly, the way he might coax a scared child out from under a table after stopping a home invasion. “Hey, Vanya.”

Her shoulders shift. She’s heard him.

“It’s me. It’s Diego.”

She turns, drowsily at first, but when she catches sight of him, she hunches her back like a cornered alley cat. 

Her eyes are dull and flat, like old coins, and she can’t even sit up properly, lifting her head and then letting it plop down onto the pillow, as if the effort had utterly drained her. Yet somehow, he gets the sense that she’s quite aware: her knuckles are white, from how tightly she’s clutching the chain attached to her handcuffs. She knows who he is. She remembers how their last meeting had gone. 

She opens her mouth, then closes it. 

“Yeah,” he says, “Yeah, it’s me. I’m here. You know, we’ve been hauling ass all over the city looking for you? Why the hell’d you run, anyway?”

He slides her tray across her lap, and Vanya hauls herself up to her elbows, swaying unsteadily. 

“I…” Vanya swallows dryly. “You’re going to kill me.” 

“What makes you think we’d do that?”

“Because you did it before. You ruined my concert. You don’t want me to play.” 

“You were going to destroy the world, Vanya. You were going to cause the apocalypse.”

Vanya blinks slowly. “No? I was just playing. I had my solo.” Her voice is soft and wavering, like she’s talking to him from the other side of a dream. “I… I had to finish it.”

 _She doesn’t know,_ he realizes. _She doesn’t know what she did._

“You destroyed the world. You blew up the moon.”

“No? That was just a dream. This is a dream too, isn’t it? It’s...”

“No,” he whispers. “No, it’s all real.”

“But I _can’t_ have done that. Why _would_ I?”

“Because you…”

 _You were never going to,_ he realizes. _Not until we came after you._

There’s a horrible feeling in his gut.

Vanya’s handcuffs jingle, and he peers down at her thin wrists. The skin around them is raw and red and clawed-at.

He’s reminded, sharply, of what he’d read in her files hours ago. He remembers reading the words _military-grade L.S.D._ and _electroshock,_ and feeling his heart drop, and he looks at her now and wonders exactly what else will be done to her.

He remembers listening to Lila’s cold chuckle as he’d read them off to her. 

She’s behind that pane of glass, Diego knows. She’s watching them, right now.

“Hey,” he says, “Listen: I’m gonna get you out of here, alright?”

“What?”

“I’m getting you out of here, real soon.”

She blinks at him, slowly. 

He glances at the door. Someone will be along to collect her tray, soon. 

He has to go. 

“I’ll be back,” he murmurs. “I’ll be back soon, and when you see me again, you’re gonna feel a lot more like yourself, I promise.”

He taps the tray, filled with food that he’d made it a point to swap out on his way up, for something free of tranquilizer.

“You’re gonna be okay, alright? I’m getting you out of here.”

Diego backs away slowly, and she watches him go, staring blankly after him as the door shuts behind him with an awful _clang._

He is struck with a horrible sort of deja vu: He’s been here before. He’s been in this exact place, staring through a window in a cell door at his sister.

He remembers how that had ended. He remembers what he didn’t do.

She’s not crying this time; Vanya is far too drained to do much else than stare at him as he slips away. He wonders if she even understands what he’d said to her, if she’ll remember it at all.

It doesn’t matter. This time, he’ll come back. 

He’ll come back, and he’ll get her out of here, and he’ll do it, not for himself, not for his family, not for Lila, but for the sake of the person that is Vanya herself.

* * *

That frigid snowy afternoon in winter, the last afternoon, was the first afternoon Ben had been truly free of the constant gnawing nausea in his gut, put there by the creatures that had made its home in his abdomen, Ben had gone stumbling down the stairs.

He’d slumped down next to Klaus, dozing on the flat leather couch in the basement lounge, and smiled at him, talking about how wonderful it was, that he didn’t feel like he had to vomit anymore, how he felt light and free and settled, how Klaus should’ve told him that it felt like _this,_ and he’d have done it sooner. And he didn’t care at all, that Klaus didn’t acknowledge him at all, too busy with his blunt to give him the time of day.

Ben thinks of that moment, now, that last one he’d ever had when he’d thought himself alive, that last hour, before the screaming had started upstairs and he’d realized exactly why the monster in his gut was so silent.

He supposes that he’s thinking of it at this moment in particular, because of Dave.

Because they’ve been sitting in this diner for so long, he wonders if Klaus’s ass has fused to the seat, if the man behind the counter staring at him is looking at his leather pants, or trying to figure out how on earth he’s going to kick out a man who’s taking up an entire booth, but carefully makes a point to order something every time a waitress who seems like she might ask him to leave is making her way towards him.

Because he’s sitting next to him, wondering if Klaus is thinking of his own last moment with Dave, that moment knee-deep in the mud in the jungle at night, when Dave’s company was a constant, before he’d reached over and realized exactly what he’d lost.

Ben had been there too. He’d been in Vietnam the whole time. Funny, how Klaus never talks about that.

The bell over the door chimes, and there’s a flash of dirty blond hair, and beside him, Klaus is straightening like a flower thrust into direct sunlight. 

It’s Dave. 

_Great,_ Ben thinks sourly, sinking deeper into the seat. _Of course, he shows up an hour before closing._

He walks in cautiously, the dog tags tangling from his fist, peering across the restaurant unsteadily. His feet keep dragging, like he’s going to make for the exit at any second.

 _Do it,_ Ben thinks. 

Then, Dave sees him, and makes his way over. 

It feels like it takes years for Dave to just cross the damn restaurant and slide in across from Klaus, and Ben keeps hoping the floor will open up and swallow him, but naturally, it doesn’t.

And Ben rises up, passing through Klaus.

Klaus peers up at him questioningly.

Ben doesn't look at him. He keeps walking, making it a point to step into Dave's path, to give him that split-second chill that always accompanies passing through a living person.

And then he's outside, choking on his own bitterness.

_You want Dave so fucking bad, fine, have him._

Klaus stares after him for a moment, but then Dave slaps the tags down on the table, and he's forgotten. 

“Alright,” he says, “What is this? I’m not enlisted yet.”

“It’s like I said,” Klaus explains, “I’m a time traveler. I’m from the future, and I came back for you. And yeah, you’re not enlisted _yet,_ but you will be soon.” 

“Listen, is this some kind of recruitment scheme? Because I talked to the guy down at the--” 

“No,” Klaus says, “No, no, no. Not a recruitment scheme. Honest. And I know, you’re going to join up in a couple days.”

“Well, no, I--”

“Look. This is gonna sound kind of crazy, but hear me out: In about a day, the president’s going to die. And that’s gonna freak you out, because you’re one of those big Uncle Sam patriot types, and personally, I’ve never understood it, but it’s just one of those things you and I have agreed to disagree on.”

Dave stares.

“So even though you’re not planning to join until after New Year’s-- don’t wanna miss that party your family throws after all, I mean I get that you have complicated feelings about being Jewish and all, but you’re not gonna miss Grandma’s latkes… But. Well. The world’s gonna speed things up a bit. And you’re gonna enlist. And you’re gonna end up in Vietnam.”

Dave’s brow furrows, in that particular way it does when he’s confused, but intrigued.

 _Okay,_ Klaus thinks. _Okay, I have him now._

He has him, and he knows exactly what to do. 

When Klaus had dropped into 1968, he stayed for Dave. But he’d stayed for the war too.

He admits this to himself quietly, in the sludgey space in the back of his heart where he keeps the most complicated of his feelings squirreled away: _Yes, I loved the war too._

Klaus was never a good soldier, but he was never a good civilian either; God knows he learned that the hard way, when he’d been out in the world on his own.

He’d loved the familiarity of it, of having orders barked in his face, of days spent crawling through the undergrowth and long sleepless nights when he’d stare into the dark and listen to gunshots a valley over, like a strange thunderstorm. He loved being back in the thick of it, where things made _sense,_ where he understood what he had to do to survive, where that constant creeping dread he feels is vindicated. Where no one’ll question his gallows humor, or his tendency to leap up at a loud, sudden sound. Where everyone around him _gets_ it. 

He loved Dave, and he loved the war, but then the war killed Dave.

 _So,_ he thinks, _I’m going to have to choose._

And so, he does.

He’s going to stop him from enlisting. 

Klaus is not going to stay in the sixties. The idea that he might blow in like a hurricane, uproot Dave from his life and take him spinning out into the world has faded. It’d been stamped out in the store this afternoon, and he knows that he’s not going to have that life with him, not with a Dave who doesn’t know who he is yet. But he can do something else.

“And you’re going to die there,” he says.

It’s complicated, what he tells him next. That he fell into the past and met Dave, that they’d become closer than anything, that they’d fought together, that Klaus had pressed his hands into his abdomen while he bled out sometime after midnight in ‘69.

Any reasonable man wouldn’t believe him at all, and frankly, he’s lucky that Dave hasn’t sprung up from the table, laughed, and gone striding out into the night. There’s a chance he still will. He’s got a bright imagination, and he’s a bit too optimistic for his own good, but that probably won’t translate to believing what Klaus has to say.

But he has to try. Dave is a kind man, and a brave man, but he’d fed himself to the front lines for nothing in a nonsense war, and if Klaus can spare him that, he should. Even if it means that they never meet, that Klaus loses all memory of him.

Dave takes it in quietly, half-smiling, half-frowning. 

“You’re my friend?” he finally says.

The words hang in the air above them, and Klaus knows exactly what he’s asking.

Klaus swallows.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m your friend.”

They’re quiet for a minute, Dave turning the tags over and over in his fingers. 

“Well,” Dave says, getting up out of his seat and brushing his hand on his pants, pocketing the tags. “You’ve, uh, given me a lot to think about.”

Klaus is rooted in place, watching the flash of his hair as he steps out, into the night, turns the corner, and vanishes like a ghost.

He’s numb, all over.

Klaus hasn’t given much of a thought, to how time travel works, but he does now. He thinks about it: If Dave changes his mind, then that means he shouldn’t remember him. He shouldn’t remember that hand clapping into his and that warm voice promising to look after him. He shouldn’t remember that night in the jungle when a mudslide nearly buried them alive. He shouldn’t remember that afternoon in Saigon, when he’d leaned over to breathe smoke into his mouth, and ended up breathing a lot more into him than that.

Nothing’s changed. He remembers it all. 

He looks down, at his arm, at the skull still inked there. He lifts up his shirt, and stares at the pattern etched into his stomach. 

Which means he’s threaded himself into a stable loop. 

Which means, Dave doesn’t believe him.

Which means, when Dave had taken to his sudden presence so instantly, had taken him under his arm and shown him around and never once questioned how he'd arrived unannounced in the depths of night... He'd known who he was. He'd known, because Klaus had gone back to introduce himself, five years before they first meet. 

Which means, _I haven’t changed a thing, have I? Nothing I do is going to change a thing, is it? He's still going to die, isn't he?_

Klaus springs up and out of the diner, tearing through the door, and skids to a halt in the street, staring wildly, up and down. 

But he’s already gone.

* * *

He feels like his heart’s been scraped raw, and the wind’s whipping over it, making it sting. 

And there Ben is, rubbing salt into it. 

“There,” says Ben coldly. “Are you satisfied? Honestly, Klaus, what did you expect? What kind of delusion--”

_“Shut up.”_

Klaus stares at him. His eyes are burning, his mouth is burning, his chest is burning, and he _hates_ Ben, just a tiny, microscopic bit. 

Ben swallows.

“Now come on,” Ben’s backing up, down the street, and despite himself, Klaus is already following. “We need to get back. We need to go home.” 

“Oh, what? You just need me to talk through?”

Ben scoffs. “Yes, I need you to conjure me, I need to talk to our family.”

Klaus grits his teeth. _You just want me for my power, don’t you? You don’t care about anything but my power._

“You know, I’m not just a battery, you know. Do you have any idea how fucking _exhausting_ conjuring you up is, Ben? You know how tired it makes me?”

Ben laughs. It’s a cold, awful sound. “You wanna talk about _exhausted?_ You ever think about how tired _I_ am?”

“Oh, come on, man, you’re a ghost, how--”

“I can’t talk to _anybody_ without you. I have to use you or no one’s ever going to know I’m even _here.”_ Ben snaps. “And half the time you ignore me too! You just tune me out and walk away and I can’t _do_ anything about it! I just have to _take_ it!”

“I do not--”

“Then what the hell was all that in Vietnam? You know, I was there too?”

“Well, of course I know you were there--”

“You think I _liked_ that? You think I liked being in the middle of a war zone? You think I liked watching you fuck around with Dave?”

“God, what the hell’s your problem with Dave anyway?”

Ben’s quiet, and the silence creeps into Klaus’s mind, stoking up that darkest, most secret of his fears, and sending it to the surface.

“Or is it with me?”

The sword’s swinging down, and it’s torn into the both of them, and they’re bleeding, everywhere.

Ben draws in a deep, ragged breath, a breath he doesn’t even need, yet is compelled to take anyway.

He can’t answer that question. He can’t, he… 

Well. He can answer some of it. “You know I have to follow you around every fucking day? I have to watch you do terrible shit to yourself, and the whole time I’m wondering if you’re just gonna drop dead, and the whole time I know I can’t do shit to stop it?”

Klaus cackles, high and mean as a hyena. “Well, that’s your own fault isn’t it? You fucking _love_ backseat driving me, don’t you? You’re…” Klaus digs desperately for the worst word he can think of, the one that’ll make Ben shut up, the one that’ll make him fold. “You’re a _parasite!_ You just… You’re _stuck_ to me, and you won’t _leave,_ and you’re _ruining_ me.”

 _“Ruining you?_ I think you’ve got to give yourself the credit for that one. You know, if you weren’t a fucking junkie, you’d be just fine? God, not only that, I’d be too.” 

Klaus gapes at him. “You don’t mean that. You _don’t_ mean that.”

 _“You_ did this to me!”

Klaus draws in a quick, hissing breath, and Ben’s mouth hangs open, like he can’t quite believe what he’s just said. 

They’re at the edge of the line, and Klaus, determined not to give Ben the last word, opts to push them over it. 

“Are you sure about that?” Klaus sneers. “I dunno, Ben. You always did want to do what I did.” 

Here they go, careening over that line, into that dark space on the edge of the map, filled with dragons and krakens and horrible, twisted, unknowable creatures, into the territory of the The Things They’ll Never Discuss. 

Here’s one of those things, the one that they’ve been rooted to for twelve years, the one that’s been haunting them like a second ghost all this time: That snowy afternoon, that last one, the one that their father had been determined to obscure the actual events of. 

Ben had always been beset by intense nausea, the consequence of being the unfortunate host to a portal of monstrous beings uncategorizable by any scientific or occult method. He’d also been tormented by an absolute, inescapable, all-consuming cloud of anxiety, the constant creeping fear that his creatures would tear loose and destroy the earth. 

He’d wanted relief. He’d wanted a moment, just a moment, of absolute quiet, of absolute _numbness._ And so, on that fine afternoon, he had gone to Klaus’s room, had rolled back the corner of his mattress to find his stash, and he’d taken it up to his room.

Ben is a careful person, it must be said; his monsters had instilled in him the importance of watchfulness, of exactness. So when he’d shaken the plastic bag of unmarked pills into his palm, and counted them out, he’d shaken out the exact number Klaus had ballparked for a successful high, and he’d taken them trustingly.

Klaus isn’t a careful person, it must be said; he is not careful, but he is not malicious. So when he’d invited Ben-- who’d always trailed after him trustingly, always eager to be a part of any scheme he’d been cooking up, even as they took on a more reckless edge as they’d grown into their teens-- up to his room, revealed his secrets to him and offered to share, he’d been honest about the number of pills it’d take to coast smoothly away from that intense, ever-present dread that the both of them had such trouble bearing the weight of. 

Neither of them had accounted for the tolerance Klaus had built up over the years, a tolerance that Ben simply did not have.

And that had been that.

They agreed, early on, that they wouldn’t talk about it. That it was too awful a subject to focus on, that it was an inherently dangerous topic to tread into like quicksand, that it might be liable to destroy them if they let it out into the open, like a caged tiger.

But now it’s out. And neither of them is quite sure who’d opened the cage, but it’s open now, and each blames the other, just a bit. Not half as much as they blame themselves, but it’s enough to distract, and so they cling to it now. 

It’s out, so Klaus, desperate to toss the blame back Ben’s way, stares at him and curls up his lip. 

“It’s not my fault you couldn’t take it.”

Ben swings at him.

And, being a ghost, his fist flickers right through Klaus’s jaw.

Klaus doubles over, howling with caustic laughter.

“Need to take a walk?” he sneers.

“Shut up.”

“You’re always following me, you know, you never leave me alone. You ever think about that, Ben? That thing called _boundaries?_ You know, maybe you like to _watch,_ that’s it! You like to watch.” 

“Hey, I didn’t ask for this! I _never_ wanted this! I never wanted to die, it was just a _mistake!”_

They’re screaming, and Klaus’s voice is bouncing off the empty street. Ben’s can only echo around the inside of Klaus’s head. 

“My God!” Klaus snaps, “Why don’t you just _go,_ then? What’s stopping you, huh?”

He brandishes an emaciated arm wildly. “Look! There’s the light! Now be a good boy and go fetch!”

“I _can’t!_ I’m stuck to you, Klaus, I _love_ you, I--”

He freezes.

For a moment, it’s like he didn’t say it at all, like it didn’t just slip out of his mouth and come to life in the air around them. 

Then Klaus turns, slowly, and looks at Ben, staring back, wide-eyed, as he slowly brings a hand up to his mouth, like it’d been too slow to stop him.

He opens his mouth, and closes it.

And he can feel the cold of the air around them all at once, enveloping him in a full-body chill, the kind that comes just before a rainstorm. 

_Is that it,_ he thinks. _Is that why you hate Dave so much? Is that why you don’t want me to save him? Is it because you're jealous?_

He doesn’t say it.

Klaus wants to do something else. He wants to lash out, to shut him up and to make him hurt, to soak in the cheap thrill of having hurt someone, of having brought them lower than you feel yourself. But Ben’s a ghost, and he’s seen exactly what’ll happen if one of them takes a swing at the other.

But there’s something else he can do. Something that’ll really show him how he feels. Something that’ll cut him off from feeling the whirlwind of messy emotion that’s churning inside him, that’s about to break loose, that he knows he'll have no _idea_ how to handle.

“You want to watch so bad?”

Klaus reaches into his pants, and produces the tin of nerve pills, cracking it open.

Ben blanches, as well as a ghost can.

“Here,” Klaus snarls, taking a handful of tiny white pills into his fingers. “Watch this.”

He takes them, swallowing them dry, tasting the bitter tang of regret on his tongue as soon as he does it.

But he does it.

And then Klaus is all alone in the dark.

He doesn’t feel any better.

* * *

For days now, Vanya has had her senses buried under a thick, dense fog.

She knows this fog; she’s known it for twenty-five years, and is quite used to navigating her way through it. So when she is given food laced with a bitter chemical tang that she recognizes implicitly as that of a sedative, she wanders into that fog with her eyes wide open. She knows that she is being drugged, that they are keeping her perpetually tired and hollowed-out, so they might be able to reach inside her easily. 

They had.

She knows they had. 

She knows that they had done something to her after they’d pumped her full of hallucinogens, something that had left her lost in a deep, dreamless slumber for a very long time. Even after she awakened, there had been the way her limbs had been twitching and spastic, and the urgent drumbeat pounding on the inside of her skull. 

Those awful symptoms had faded from her, thankfully, but then she had been left alone in that fog.

No, not alone. Not always.

For a few minutes, Diego had been there. 

If Vanya were not keenly aware of what it is like to live a life crushed under the weight of heavy sedation, she’d have taken him for a dream.

But she had known, when she’d heard the soft tone of his voice, when she had turned and seen his large dark eyes peering at her, that he had been real. He was _real,_ he was right there in front of her, and he had not harmed her. He hadn’t drawn a knife out from his belt, or from some hidden compartment sewn into his uniform, and he hadn’t drawn a thick bloody line across her throat. 

He had simply spoken to her, and then been on his way.

He’d told her that she killed the world. He'd told her that he was going to help her escape. And then he had gone.

In the hours since, Vanya has felt that dense cloud wrapped around her mind dissipate, and she has been better able to think, to keep her eyes open, to worry about what’s going to be done with her.

A part of her wonders if it was a trick.

Diego had always hated her the most, when they were children, had always been quick to cut into her with an awful word, or to sneer at her for trying to sneak in among the rest of the pack. And of all her siblings, he’d been the only one to go looking for her just to hammer in a harsh word, or to shove her into a wall; that tended to happen on the days when Dad had yelled at him.

He’d been sweet once, a long time ago, in that blurry time at the edge of her memory. When they were children, when she’d suddenly been excluded from everything, she’d fallen in with him. For a few months, they’d been each other’s favorites, two angry children furious with the new status quo, determined to plot some way around it. 

Then, Dad had come along, and told him how important it was to be Number Two, and that had been that.

Sometimes, Vanya thinks Diego was especially cruel to her to compensate for that, that it was his method of waving a shining flag in front of the family and crying, _see? I don’t like the lowest child on the totem pole anymore! I’m not weak!_

 _(Sure you’re not,_ she’d think viciously, more and more often as she got older, _sure you never liked me. Sure, I don't have your first kiss.)_

So seeing him then, it had been so easy to believe he’d been lying to her. 

But then, her mind had cleared. Her thoughts no longer seem to be streaming through a filter of thick, wet sand.

And that means…

Vanya sits up in bed, tugging her hair out of her face. She closes her eyes, throws out her senses, and listens.

The steady and ever-present drumbeat of her heart. The soft buzzing of the fluorescents overhead. Silence from behind the mirror-that-isn’t-a-mirror. A babble of noise erupting from below her, a dozen confused voices crying out in frustration at some accident she can’t discern. The clattering of footsteps outside the door.

The footsteps. Soft and quick and light as a panther’s, the footfalls of a man who knows how to run swiftly and silently…

Oh. 

She knows who’s coming, long before he’s there, a face flashing in the window, the metallic scraping of the lock, the squeal of the hinges as the door pulls open.

Diego’s back.

 _He wasn't lying,_ she thinks.

Vanya straightens, lifting her legs down from the bed, and pressing her feet into the tile floor. The long skirt of her dress pools at her thighs, and she leans forward, to nudge it down. She sways a bit, unused to standing after spending so long dozing in bed, or being carted around in wheelchairs, and tugs at the length of chain binding her wrists to the bedframe. She doesn’t trust herself with her powers enough to try shattering it; she might take the rest of the room with it, she might tear off her arms. 

He’s digging a key into the cuffs, the ones on both her wrists and ankles. Then, he's pulling her hands loose and tugging her by one of her raw wrists towards the door. 

“Hey,” he’s saying, but his words may as well be coming from a mile away, “Hey, you’re good, right? Head’s clearing up? Come on, let’s go.”

Vanya stares at him, letting him pull her through the hallway.

 _Now,_ she thinks, _I am in a dream._

They’re running down the hall, then turning sharply, Diego keeping a tight grip on her arm.

She thinks she hears his name, cried out by a voice she doesn't recognize at all, but it's gone so quickly, she might've imagined it.

If Diego heard it, he gives no sign. 

He swings her around one corner, then the next, then shoves her through a door to a stairwell. 

An alarm begins screaming, the second they’ve cleared the landing, a high, shrill, terrible sound that beats into Vanya’s working ear and makes her wish, sincerely, that it had been shattered with the other. The sound spears its way into her, threatening to shake her apart, and she doubles over, seizing up and clawing at her ear, digging the heel of her hand into it. 

Diego won’t let her stop, catching her by the collar of her shirt and his touch is too much.

The sound explodes from her all at once, sending Diego sailing into the wall with a grunt, making the floor and ceiling tiles ripple like rogue waves, shattering a wall of glass that Vanya realizes, suddenly, is a set of _windows._

They’re on the ground floor of the building. They’re on the ground floor, and the street is _right there,_ and she can smell the damp air on the cold night wind. 

_No, I'm not in a dream at all, am I? I'm awake, and I've escaped, and the way out is right in front of me._

She doesn’t think. She _can’t_ think. Her heart’s hammering so fast in her chest, and her mind has gone numb, this time with terror. 

She looks back at Diego, groaning and winded on the floor. He'll be _so_ angry with her.

And then she looks up, at the street ahead.

 _This is my chance,_ Vanya realizes.

And she takes it.

She moves, with the frantic, mindless instinct of a hunted animal, sprinting through the jagged gap, leaping over a scattering of glass shards and racing into the maze of streets. The cold night wind folds around her, pressing into her shoulders like the arm of an encouraging friend, urging her onwards, and in her fear, her power rises and rises and _rises,_ making the walls of brick around her tremble, shaking the glass of the windows until they're singing in their panes, shaking the rain loose from the clouds until it's torrenting down over the city.

When the room stops spinning in his vision, and Diego finally crawls to his feet, she's long gone.

There's only Lila, staring down at him, the beginnings of a snarl on her face.

"What the _hell_ did you just do?" she hisses. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Being massively displeased with this chapter, I'm just happy to have it done.


	5. reluctant renegade

When the watery gray light of new morning had dawned, Five had greeted it grimly, with a deep fatigue brought on by night after night of continued restlessness. 

He’d stared at the clock, as it’d stuck six, knowing that across the city, his past self, the fifty-eight-year-old one in a thirteen-year-old body, was landing in an alleyway, crumpling to his knees in a puddle of the rain soaking the windshield of the car Luther was driving up to Dallas. That said past self was looking up to the muzzle of a gun in his face.

And what’s more, he could _feel_ it, the skittering of invisible insects over his bones and along the underside of his skin, making him scratch his arms until he drew blood.

And he could feel the moment his fifty-eight-year-old thirteen-year-old self left, too, by the way he was suddenly relieved of that discomfort. 

_Alright,_ he thought. _Stage two. I’m already at stage two of paradox psychosis. Love that._

The sun kept rising, and they made it to Dealey a half hour later.

Five had gone off into the misty morning rain to scout the area, ostensibly, to comb over the Grassy Knoll for anything he might find useful in the confrontation to come.

Mostly, it’d been to ensure that Luther and Allison wouldn’t interfere; he needs to account for fewer variables, and he needs to be alone for this. He can’t put them in the line of fire, not against himself, especially when he still hasn’t determined the right course of action to deal with his past self, nor has he found the proper loophole to escape his predicament entirely. 

_But that’s fine,_ he tells himself, to still his hammering heart, _it’s fine, don’t you see? I’ve got it. I’m gonna figure it out. I won’t think about what’ll happen if I fail, because I_ won’t _fail. I’m smarter than this. I’m smarter than Carmichael and the Commission. They underestimate just how smart I am, just how strong I am, and I’ll show them, oh yes I will..._

The clouds clear, and the clock strikes twelve. 

The urge to rake his nails into his skin arrives with it.

So. The him that’s younger-yet-older, has arrived. 

Five remembers his arrival. He’d landed in the bathrooms at the Irish pub on Main, had made a beeline straight for the urinal because he…

Oh shit. 

He was on stage three.

Five’s mouth suddenly feels like it’s full of sand. He swallows, he swipes his tongue across the insides of his teeth, he jumps to a water fountain, shoves a man out of the way and starts drinking like a camel fresh out of the desert, and it still doesn’t satisfy him.

Fuck.

Paradox psychosis, from what he’d heard whispered about it among the other Corrections Agents, who Five ordinarily refused to socialize with on principle, tends to snowball. The first stages take a while to wear off, but they also happen slowly. But then, then they start to pick up, faster and faster, until you’re slammed like a hammer with the final one.

Which means, he needs to hurry.

He needs to find his past self. He needs to reason with him, to go through with the assassination, _no,_ to tell him about the apocalypse and Vanya’s role in it, _no,_ to… to…

Five can’t catch his train of thought.

Because there he is. 

There _he_ is, there’s his younger-older self, walking down Elm Street with a briefcase in one hand and a suitcase in another. 

Five stares, watching himself disappear behind the fence lining the Knoll, his feet almost rooted into place.

 _What am I doing,_ he thinks, _what am I doing, I have to go up there, I have to talk to myself. I have to reason with myself._

Which, given that he’s not exactly a reasonable man, means he’s probably going to turn the Knoll into a shooting gallery. 

So, when Five jumps himself into the very space he’d been standing sixteen days ago, when he’d been forty-three years older, he’s bracing himself for a bullet to the gut.

He doesn’t get it. 

Instead, his younger older self drops his rifle in shock, his eyes bulging from his head.

“Yeah,” Five grimaces. “Hi. I’m exactly who you think I am.” 

“You’re me?”

“Yup. I’m you, sixteen days from now.”

His younger older self rakes his eyes up and down Five’s body, and his face is burning.

“How--”

“Miscalculation on my part. Put the decimal in the wrong spot, I’m pretty sure. See, you’re planning to desert, right? Well. You do. And you make it back to the family, but you land a few years shy of where you’re aiming. And in a body that’s… well. This.”

His younger older self is silent. The little radio he’d hung on the end of the picket fence is buzzing eagerly about the president. 

“Why are you here?” he growls, eyes narrowing to slits. “Oh, I know, you’re here to kill me.” 

Which. Oh shit. They’ve crossed the border into stage four. 

His heart is battering the barrel of his chest, and he can’t _see,_ his vision’s gone blurry. Five reaches up, mopping the slick of sweat coating his forehead away with his narrow wrist.

“You need to listen to me--”

“Kiss my ass, kid.”

“Why are you so stubborn?!” Five snaps.

 _“You_ tell _me!”_ his younger older self retorts.

His past self’s turned on him, that’s the first explanation Five’s frantic mind finds. There’s nothing he can do now, to convince him to go through with the mission; there’s nothing he can _do,_ to convince him to check his equation one last time, to make him believe that Vanya causes the apocalypse. His past self’s turned on him, and if Five says anything at all he’ll _attack,_ and his younger older self is the greatest agent the Commission’s ever had; does anyone have any idea how _dangerous_ that makes him? 

See, the Commission, they’re all a bunch of tigers, so hungry, so poised, all sharp teeth and swagger. A tiger shows a hundred stripes, but Five knows tigers well, he knows they have _more_ than that; he knows a tiger hides them until he’s ready to strike, and Five’s in the jungle now. He’s too fast for them, he’s always been too fast for them. They have teeth and stripes and things that tear. But he’s _much_ too fast. They want his flesh, but they don’t know where the jungle is, only _he_ knows where the jungle is, only _he_ knows, because he’s a gazelle and the jungle’s his home… which means only he can defeat himself, and his past self knows him, knows all his secrets, knows what it’ll take to take him down.

Which means Five has to take him down first, you _see?_

He doesn’t have a gun on him, nor a knife. He has nothing but his own two fists and he decides, with all the desperation of an animal that knows damn well it has to chew its own leg off to escape a hunter’s snare, to beat the shit out of himself.

Five makes a running sprint at his old self, draws back his fist to strike...

And is promptly hammered with a fist to the jaw, the force of which sends him skidding backwards on his heels, smacked swiftly to the ground. 

His skull cracks on the pavement, and the sky’s spinning above him, his limbs all turned to lead. He’s feeling the cold of the concrete seep into his back, too punch-drunk to move. 

Five, it seems had been slingshotted into the depths of Stage Six: Homicidal Rage. 

And, well. It hadn’t gone too great for him.

His consciousness ebbs and flows from him; somewhere just out of sight, his younger older self is raising his rifle to the president’s head, is reconsidering his escape plan, is drawing out his old beloved keepsake and flipping through it, to find the numbers that will lead him home.

The searing bright flash of a vortex of temporal energy burns into the insides of Five’s eyelids, the electrical wind crawling over his limbs and through his hair.

And then, Five is alone, staring at the sun.

And the only thing he can think about is how he doesn’t remember doing _any_ of this, not as his younger self; he doesn’t remember the conversation because…

The equation. He’d fucked it up, he hadn’t _just_ lost his adult body, he’d lost some of his memories on the way in, hadn’t he? He’d landed in the courtyard, and he couldn’t recall exactly what had lead to his arrival there; everytime he tries to think about the exact sequence of events that lead to his jump in time, they’d appear scattered, obscured behind a cloud of dark shimmering that only seemed to thicken the more he tried to look through it. 

He thinks he knows why now; time-travel is complicated, and the Commission is keenly aware of this, of how fickle time is, how reluctant to allow true change to occur, and had known that the best way to ensure a change was to skip pebbles across the surface of time, rather than tossing boulders in and making a splash. Acorns, instead of oak trees, if his father’s shitty metaphor is to be applied.

One such way to make a wave large enough to tear a gaping hole in the timeline is by meeting one’s past self, or in short, by creating a paradox, and paradoxes, by their destructive ouroborosian nature, are not tolerated by time. Hence, the nature of paradox psychosis.

Five cannot recall meeting his older-younger self. He searches his memories, and simply cannot recall it.

He realizes now, that it’s not because he hadn’t met himself before. It’s because he _had._

It hadn’t been the equation that had scattered his memories of his defection from the Commission. It wasn’t the result of carrying the wrong two or multiplying the wrong integer; it’d been the seventh and final stage of paradox psychosis, kicking into gear, erasing his own memories of his past self and by doing so, creating a stable time loop.

He’s done this before.

He’s done this before, and he’s doing this now, and… and he’s not going to stop himself. _He’s not going to stop himself,_ he isn’t even going to send his past self into the future with the information necessary to save the world because he _didn’t,_ because _he doesn’t._

And this is a loop. This is all a fucking _loop._

And Carmichael had known. He’d known the entire time, that Five would be playing into a fucking loop, he’d _planned_ for it. 

He’d planned for it, to keep Five out of the Commission’s hair.

And he’d planned for it, because he was going to have Five killed anyway. 

Five’s a fucking idiot. He’d been sent on a merry chase for days, had finally caught his prey, only to realize he’d swallowed his own tail.

He starts laughing, the stress of the last week melting off of him like wax. He’d gone and put on his wings and gone flying right back into the sun, and now, in freefall, he finally feels himself relax.

* * *

Klaus sniffs, blinking at the blaze of sunlight flashing in his eyes.

He rubs his eyes, and sits up on the bench he’s been sleeping on, the one in the ramshackle wooden shelter of a bus stop, the one he’d stumbled into when the rain had beaten down on his back.

He looks over his shoulder reflexively, but there aren’t any calm dark eyes peering back at him. There’s no well-meant, but still slightly condescending comment for him about how he really ought to find an apartment, no squawk of laughter at the way his hair’s been licked up in a funny pattern by the bench.

For a second, he wonders why, feels a tense twist in his gut.

Then, he registers the weight of the bottle in his palm, the smooth glass warmed by his grip, and he remembers.

After his little domestic with Ben yesterday, he’d gone on a little bit of a bender.

It’s so easy to be like this. So _easy,_ to hide from it all, to camouflage himself in a cloud of drugs and alcohol, so his problems won’t recognize them, so they’ll swim right by and look for someone else to chew on. Maybe if he disguises himself as a ghost, as well as a person whose heart is still beating can, then they’ll leave him be. 

That last bit of money he’d brought with him from 2019 is gone now. It’d vanished from his pockets, quick as a magic trick, the second he’d walked past that liquor store, and _abracadabra,_ a bottle of booze had appeared in each hand!

And, well. 

Klaus drops his heavy feet down to the sidewalk, and sways out and into the street, feeling half-puppeted, by the way he can hardly hang onto himself. 

He’s still drifting in a cloud of peaceful, numbing silence, and when he looks around, there are no shadows licking at the edge of his vision. 

He wanders like a stray breeze through Oak Lawn, staring at the signs as they pitch and whirl like they’re caught in a kaleidoscope. He can’t find the one he’d been looking for, the one whose name has seeped into the mush of his brain and he just can’t...

Klaus sighs, plopping down onto the curb, bringing one of the bottles up to his mouth, and tapping it with the butt of his palm, to try and get the last stubborn drops stuck to the bottom to trail down the side, through the neck, into his lips. 

He looks to his left, then his right, and he groans. 

It’s easy, it’s supposed to be easy, and he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t feel any better.

Maybe he just needs to dive a little deeper. If the bottles won’t yield anything more, then maybe…

Klaus digs the tin out of his pocket and… no. No it’s empty. He’d gone and swallowed them all, popping them like jelly beans all night. Fuck.

“Fuck!” he snaps, hurling the tin into the street, watching it skid across the asphalt in a silver, bullet-like flash. 

Then, for good measure, he throws his second bottle, his backup bottle, the one he doesn’t have an emotional attachment to, and watches it _bounce_ in a way he hasn’t expected glass to actually be able to do. He wanted a good clean burst, a comet of glass spreading across the street. Instead, the damn thing just kind of _rolls_ over to the gutter, and stays there.

He grumbles, his tongue lapping weakly at the inside of his mouth. There’s a hideous taste in it, like he’s been gargling gasoline. 

The cloud’s still over him, weighing him down, seeping into his skin and suffocating him, but he can still sort of think. He’s gotten very good at that, over the years. 

So he thinks, as well as he is able, reaching out and grasping at one particular thought that’s been swinging over his head for hours and hours. 

Ben had called him delusional. 

And, well. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was a lot to ask, for Dave to suddenly swell up with an instantaneous and highly-convenient flood of memory, to look at him with perfect recognition and decide to cast off his life as if it were a retail uniform at the end of a shift, and run off with him into the sunset. 

_But that’s the nature of delusions,_ Klaus muses, taking his own and slicing into it with a scalpel, flaying it open to see what it yields him.

Delusions are, of course, truths that tell lies, and the delusion of Dave suddenly realizing his future love is right in front of him is of course, fed by the simple truth that Klaus wants to be loved by someone. The lie, of course, is that it’ll be Dave who does it.

Klaus, far from comfortable with feelings as intimate as those that are being stirred by that realization, reaches for his remaining bottle, the one he’d arbitrarily decided was his favorite of the two, and starts searching for another sip. 

Failing to find it, he rifles around in his vest, pulling out a cheap cigarette, and lights it. 

Ben, for the record, is sitting right next to him. He’d gone floating off, like a kite into the darkness, after their fight, but like all kites, he’d been inevitably drawn back by the invisible string tethering the two of them together, the kind that tethers all ghosts to those they’re attached to, if they’re lucky to be attached to anyone at all.

And he is lucky, you know. He’s very lucky. He’s known this for years, he’s kept that quiet, delicate truth hidden inside him since he was seventeen and Klaus was twenty-two. It’d come upon him slowly, softly, like a whisper, and by the time he’d heard the words for what they were, they’d already gotten stuck in him, and the feeling they shaped had been there for years.

He stares at the bright point at the end of Klaus’s cigarette, at the puff of smoke that he huffs out, before coughing raggedly. 

That first time it’d _clicked_ for him, Klaus had been smoking, leaning back on a bench in the middle of Morrison Park one summer night. Some show had been playing in the plaza, some garage band that’d set up a concert that was probably illegal, and having nothing better to do, they’d gone to observe. Klaus, between highs, had stared at him through a veil of smoke, then leaned forward with a feline smile, blowing a plume of it right through Ben, and by the time the fumes had passed through him, he’d known _exactly_ what that feeling was. 

And now, Klaus knows too.

And _God,_ what a mess they’d made.

Klaus frowns. It’s gotten awful quiet outside, for a Friday right around lunchtime. Especially given that he’s been sitting in front of a perfectly respectable-looking business for about fifteen minutes now, blatantly out of it, and in a pair of _very_ anachronistic leather pants, and no one’s asked him to leave yet.

Around now, someone would probably be poking at him with the toe of a shoe, or the pointy end of a broom, warning him that he needs to leave, that he’s upsetting some customer or another. He’s quite an eyesore ordinarily, the kind that draws your attention and immediately deflects it, sending it skittering off like a rat to focus on anything but him, once you’ve realized what he is, and why he’s so jittery. 

But no one comes to get him.

Klaus turns, staring around him blearily.

Everyone’s rushing inside, staring at something on TV, something that’s got their vague silhouettes straightening up in shock. Maybe a sports game is on or something. Maybe Luke and Laura are getting married. Whatever. He doesn’t care.

It’s nice, actually, that everyone’s…

No, not everyone.

There’s a funny-looking woman in a blue suit staring at him. She looks like she’s on her way somewhere, by the looks of the paper she keeps consulting, and _jeez_ that case in her hand looks heavy. 

“Here,” Klaus says, offering her the mostly-empty bottle. Maybe she can shake a few drops loose. Maybe that’ll turn her frown upside-down.

She takes it, rolling over and over in her palms studiously.

 _“Klaus,”_ Ben says urgently, staring at the briefcase shackled to her palm, remembering, suddenly, acutely, exactly where he’d seen it before. 

His words fall on deaf ears. 

“Hey,” Klaus says, smacking his lips. “Can I get that back?”

She obliges, by smashing him in the skull with it.

* * *

In the misty morning hours leading up to the moment of interest, Allison and Luther had quietly come to realize that they simply could not trust Five. 

Something’s wrong with him. He hasn’t been sleeping, only paces like a frantic caged animal in a slaughterhouse. He hasn’t eaten, only gulped gallon after gallon of coffee, staring at the well-worn pages he’d been provided by the Commission, muttering nonsense words under his breath. And in the days leading up to this moment, Five has led them in dizzying circles of logic, spiraling madly out into incoherence, before blowing up in vicious fits, or else vanishing for long spells without a word. 

The only thing they seem to all be on the same page on is that they’re going to have to kill the president, but he’s offered no clear plan of action as to how exactly they’re going to do it, and the clock had run down to the day they were to do it, and he’d still not presented a coherent plan. 

Last night, Allison had found a little leaflet in the back of Five's mission file. It was heavily crumpled, so stained by coffee she couldn't make out half of it, but what she could distinguish was this:

`Paradox Psychosis At A Glance: Get To Know The Seven Stages!`

  1. `Denial`
  2. `Itching`
  3. `Extreme Thirst and Urination`
  4. `Acute Paranoia`
  5. `Uncontrolled Perspiration`
  6. `Homicidal Rage`



Of course, unlucky number seven was so desecrated by coffee that she couldn't make it out. But the first six, quite frankly, were enough to tell Allison exactly what they'd be dealing with.

She'd slapped the leaflet down in front of Luther, and hissed “We’re being led by a madman,” in one of those long spells of waiting for Five to return from staking out the same stretch of parking lot, again and again, muttering about how he knows _exactly_ what to do. Luther, after reading, had sighed, bowing his head in reluctant agreement.

So when Five starts clawing at his arms like a flea-bitten dog, they know exactly what they're up against. And they also know that the likelihood that the scattered sort of panic that'd overcome him on the drive over, the sudden shift from anxious posturing to arrogant bluster, had in fact been Number Five experiencing the first stage of paradox psychosis (rather than simply being Number Five under an undue amount of stress, which seemed to be the case for the past few days) just went up significantly.

So, they know that they won't be able to rely on him for a coherent plan, given where the rest of the stages seem to be headed.

So, when Five’s vanished on them, presumably to stake out the Grassy Knoll where his past self will supposedly arrive in a few hours, they decide to take matters into their own hands. 

“Well, let’s see. Oswald shoots him from up there,” Luther points at the School Book Depository, at the window beloved by history buffs and conspiracy theorists, that he sincerely hopes he’ll never have to obsess over again after this awful day is over with, “But it’s not fatal. And we… and he has to die from a gunshot wound… God, what the hell. This doesn’t make any sense. How are we going to do this?”

He gnaws on his lip, staring down at the image of his mother, of his and Five’s mother. He keeps taking it out of his pocket, folding it and unfolding it, running his fingers over her face with such an odd expression twisted on to his face that Allison cannot fathom what he’s thinking.

Allison stares sourly out the window, at the rain spitting down on them. One awful thing she’s learned about her scar is that it aches something terrible when it rains. She reaches up, to run her thumb along the puckered skin, wincing.

“And we don’t even have a do-over,” Luther says, and she can hear the slight tremble in his voice, the one that betrays exactly how frightened he must be. That awful existential panic that had utterly possessed Five seems to have been contagious, and it's caught in Luther. And now, it’s showing itself. 

Five’s not the only one who’d been plagued by little sleep in the past few days. Allison had spent many of those nights staring into space, trying to stretch her mind and wrap it around the idea, that Luther and Five will simply _not exist_ if they do not succeed. 

She tries to do it now, in the front seat of their car, to conceive of a world where they fail, where her brothers never come to be.

She can’t imagine it. She simply _can’t._

What on earth would that even _mean?_ Would they all--Allison and Diego and Klaus and Vanya and Ben-- cease to exist as they are, then, given how deeply their lives are intertwined? Would that save the world?

 _No,_ she decides immediately; _it wouldn’t save the world, the Commission wouldn’t do anything that’d jeopardize the apocalypse, that if nothing else, Five has been very clear on._

Or would we all still exist, but with two great, terrible holes ripped in the center of their lives? 

Would anything at all remain of them, a memory, or an echo of a voice, or a dream of someone she might’ve loved once, in some other life?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know. 

_I_ won’t _know,_ Allison decides firmly. _Because we’re going to figure this out, and we’re going to save the two of them._ She looks over at Luther, and slides her free hand across the seat, to tangle their fingers together. _We are going to save you. I am going to save you._

“We have one shot, to get this right, and we can’t even _guarantee_ anything.”

Allison straightens, and her hand comes to a stop on her neck.

 _No,_ she realizes. She has a way to guarantee it right here.

She doesn’t feel afraid, thinking what she’s thinking; it’s the opposite, actually, like a weight’s been removed from her chest and she can finally breathe. Her brothers are losing themselves to fear, so it falls to her to handle this, and she simply _knows_ that she can. 

“Can I see that?” she whispers, as if saying the words too loud will make the idea that’s just sprung into her mind fly away and out of her reach.

She’s handed the briefing, and she pours over it.

Allison glances at her watch. It’s half-past-seven in the morning. She checks the itinerary again, just to be sure.

There’s time.

 _Yes,_ she thinks in triumph, _I’ve got it._

Here’s the thing: Allison can’t just dress up like Jackie, lean over and **hear a rumor that the back of his head is about to explode.** She’d never be able to get close enough to _try_ that, never mind that her power doesn’t operate in the realm of the physically impossible. Dad had tried that with her for years, and he’d never quite forgiven her for not being able to divine objects out of thin air, or make statues come to life and dance. 

But she can do something else, though. 

“We need to drive,” she says. 

Luther has picked up on the urgency in her tone. “What’s happening?”

“I know what to do. I know how to do this. But we have to go, right now.” 

Luther looks out the window, scouring the scene for Five.

But he’s gone.

He swallows thickly, turning to Allison, and straightens immediately, recognizing the burning in her eyes.

“What are you thinking?”

“You want a guarantee. A failsafe.” Her hand falls away from her neck. “I have one.”

Luther gets it. He puts the car in drive.

On the way over, she outlines her plan, as she retouches her lipstick and tucks loose strands that had fallen from her updo into place. It’s very important that she look as presentable as possible, given where she’s going. 

They pull up two streets short of the Hotel Texas a little over a half hour later, and Allison checks herself in the mirror once more.

She’s probably not going to be allowed into the hotel anyway, but she wants to look especially put-together nonetheless. The logic she’d used when she’d left the Rofas’ dressed in the nicest of the dresses she’s been gifted, the powder-blue one Odessa had pointedly offered to her to wear for a church service she’d backed out of attending… well, that logic still stands. She is going to go see the president, and she will look her best for it.

She steps out, into the street, and Luther squeezes her hand before she goes. 

Allison is eerily calm as she walks the two streets over to the hotel, as she falls in with a thick river of guests pouring in, as she leans into the ear of a man at the door bearing the hotel’s uniform who looks at her funny and **heard a rumor that he doesn’t see her at all.**

Her throat stings. Oh, this is going to hurt like a _bitch._

But it works. His eyes glass over, and he stares right through her, and Allison knows from years of experimentation with her power that even when she leaves, he won’t see her. 

The lobby’s bustling with people, here to hear the president’s address, so Allison and her accomplice skirt their way around, long enough to gather the geography of the place, to find the ballroom, and figure out which of the elevators is nearest to it.

Having determined this, she calls it, and the elevator operator who **heard a rumor he’ll let her stay here as long as she needs to** pays her no mind as he waits to be summoned to the eighth floor, where the president is staying. 

According to the itinerary, he’s due to give a speech in the ballroom at nine in the morning, which suggests to Allison that he’ll board an elevator down at least fifteen minutes beforehand. 

She checks her watch. It’s eight-twenty-nine. 

She waits, running her fingers back and forth over the handle of her purse, clearing her throat again and again. Minutes pass, and they feel like hours. 

And then, there’s a call from the eighth floor. 

Here they go.

Allison clears her throat one last time, and then she’s perfectly still, feeling that old, familiar pre-mission numbness wash over her like a wave. Her heart slows, like she’s preparing to dive deep into the ocean with only a single breath.

The doors open, and a face Allison’s only ever seen in news footage and in textbook photos is right in front of her, floating like a flesh-and-blood ghost. She smiles coolly at him, at the man behind him from his protection detail, like she’s in elevators with presidents she’s about to kill every day. 

There’s a flicker of hesitation in his face, an expression Allison identifies immediately now as the _are-you-sure-you-belong-here_ look, and she feels her heart still.

He turns his back, and the doors close. 

_Okay,_ she thinks. _Okay. Here we go._

Kennedy’s right in front of her now, paging through the speech he’s to give in a matter of minutes. 

Allison takes a step forward, and raises her voice. “Excuse me? I’m so sorry.”

He turns, and fixes her with a movie-star smile. 

She draws in a breath. 

When she’d poured over the specifics in Five’s mission plan, she’d taken in each and every one of the limitations, laying them out in her mind and building herself a map with them. He must give this speech, he must be in Dealey at noon, he must be shot by Oswald, and he must be delivered to the hospital where he will be pronounced dead at an exact time. That is, if the mission goes through.

It’s all she needs. 

The devil is in the details, when it comes to her power. She’d learned long ago to choose her words especially carefully, to mind the boundaries. One misplaced word could render a rumor impossible, and therefore defunct. Conversely, being too inexact with her phrasing could lead to unintentional consequences. 

Say, for example, that if she hears a rumor that someone’s going to die, if she doesn’t specify how, their hearts tend to just stop beating.

So, when Allison **hears a rumor that you’ll be dead by one o’clock, today,** she knows his heart will stop beating sometime just before one. And that being where he is just before one, he’ll have been shot in the head, he’ll be on an operating table, and no one will be able to tell that the bullets hadn’t been what caused it.

It feels… anticlimactic.

She says the words, and watches his eyes turn to milky glass, and knows it will be done. That no matter what does or does not happen, they will be safe. 

She **heard a rumor that none of you remember I was here,** and gets off at the second floor. 

Allison takes a minute, walking down the stairs, and locating a side entrance to duck out of. 

Somewhere in the middle of it all, when she breaks out into the morning air and the chill wraps itself around her, the severity of what she’s done hits her. Allison claps a hand over her mouth, raking in quick lungfuls of air, and she begins to wobble precariously in her heels, blinking quickly.

She doesn’t understand why it’s affecting her so much. She had to do it, she _had_ to. She did it to _save_ them, she...

She makes it back to the car, and Luther only has to look at her to know that she’s done it. 

He helps her in, and she attaches herself to his side as they drive, nestling her face into his shoulder, and trying to ignore the pulsing ache in her throat.

They’re heading back to the Plaza. They need to wait for Five, if he ever shows up. They need to watch, to see if things happen the way the folder in his lap says they’re meant to.

It’s a long wait. 

They watch the clouds roll away, and they watch the plaza fill with onlookers, and, there being so much to say, they opt instead for companionate silence, and listen to the buzzing of the distant crowd. 

The clock strikes ten, eleven, twelve.

Allison stares through the windshield at everyone watching, at the patchwork of people who have no _idea_ what’s about to happen, and she feels the distance between them stretch wider and wider and wider. She thinks, oddly, _we are on the moon, you and I._

Then, the crowd erupts, and Allison and Luther turn as one, to peer in the opposite direction of the onlookers, to the stripe of white fence where Five had told them his younger self would be. The angle they’re sitting at is bad; they can’t see anything at all. 

So they climb out, squinting through the sunlight. 

Their hands are entwined, and they catch a stare from a woman standing nearby. They pay her no mind; she’ll be staring at something else any minute now. 

The motorcade’s behind them, and the crowd’s roaring. 

And for a split second, a flash of electricity, from behind the knoll, like a spark of pale blue lightning. 

“Five,” Allison says, but before the word’s completely left her mouth, there are three sharp _cracks,_ like a whip, behind them. And not a fourth, from ahead.

And everyone’s screaming.

Allison doesn’t need to look to know what happened. She can picture it perfectly in her head: a blood-bursting hollow has cracked his skull wide open, and spatters of brain have soiled his cheek.

She sighs. She’s just glad it’s over with. 

She's done it, and they're safe. Now to tell Five, and to get their family, and to get the hell out of Texas. 

They start walking, almost leisurely, towards the fence, towards whichever Five must be there. If it’s theirs, Luther’s decided he’s going to kick his ass for the sheer load of stress he’d put them under.

“We’ll be okay,” Allison says firmly. “You’ll be okay. You both will. I took care of it.”

Luther looks down at her, at how utterly convinced she is, and feels his chest bloom with warmth. He thinks, _yeah, love’s nice._

They make it to the fence, and work their way around it, picking their way into a parking lot.

“Five?” Luther calls.

There’s movement, behind one of the cars, and Allison takes off after it, Luther on her heels.

They round the corner and skid to a halt. 

They’re staring down the barrel of a pair of loaded guns, held by a trio of blue-suited men. 

“Well,” says one of them, “You’re not who I was expecting.”

* * *

Lila’s angry with him.

She’d stared down at him with such a look of naked loathing smoldering in her dark eyes that he’d been taken aback, as if she’d reached out and stamped his chest in with her red heel.

“You weren’t supposed to let her _go,”_ she snarled, and Diego had known then, deep in his gut, that his instinct had been correct, that his decision to go ahead with retrieving Vanya without her, while she was busy drawing all the attention of the guards to the third floor had been the correct one. 

But he hadn’t planned to let Vanya leave without him.

Diego stared at the jagged gap in the glass and sighed wearily, crawling to his feet.

“She’s out here somewhere,” he’d said, as they begun their tense walk back to the hotel.

Despite himself, he was still stuck in the thought that Lila was here to help them, that if she was here for his family, then surely she wouldn’t object to tracking down someone else. “We can find her. But we’d have an easier time of it with the rest of my family. Let’s go get my brother Klaus and--”

“I don’t care about your fucking _brother,”_ Lila whipped around and hissed in his face, baring all her teeth, “We need to find _Vanya!”_

He didn’t get it, then. He didn’t get why she’s so furious, when it wasn’t as though her mission had been compromised in any way; there was still plenty of time to complete it. 

“What do you want with her anyway?”

As quickly as her rage had arrived, she seemed to swallow it. It’d been as though a switch flipped in her brain, and suddenly, she was calm again, saying lightly: “Oh, she’s a _special_ girl, your sister. That’s all.”

Lila shrugged her shoulders and strutting ahead towards the revolving doors, her teal skirt swishing behind her.

But he’d seen it. And she knew he’d seen it; he could tell by the way her eyes kept shifting towards him in the elevator, slicing at his skin and daring him to say something.

Supposedly, you’re not supposed to go to bed angry. But that’s exactly what she does, slamming her door in his face. Diego paused for a moment, listening to the muffled musical crash of something inside her suite, something made of glass, that she’d hurled at the wall, as if she were a child in the throes of a temper tantrum.

He didn’t sleep that night. He’d pulled the armoire in front of the door connecting their rooms, and lay on his back in a bed too luxurious for him to sleep well in anyway, pouring over the possibilities as he turned the rabbit’s paw over and over in his fingers. 

_She’s lying,_ a voice in the back of his head says. 

And he knows it to be true. Something’s being hidden from him, something vital, something about why she wants Vanya and only Vanya. 

He just doesn’t understand why.

He gets his answer that afternoon, after hours of pacing in circles, waiting for the axe to swing down on his head. 

Diego hears the soft rumble of conversation through the wall.

She’s talking to someone on the phone, and Diego crawls off his bed, shoving the armoire away so he can press an ear to the door.

“--gone, I’m telling you, and I’ve no idea where… Yes, I’m aware that’s a reduction, but that’s _hardly_ fair, I’ll have you know my mother gave me this job, and she was a very important woman in this organization, so I’d suggest you _watch your tone with me,_ as I’m in line to be Head of Security… You have them? The skinny one? The other two?... Yes, that’s good. And I have the other in my possession as we speak, it’s just her that I’ve lost track of. Now what about Number Five?”

Diego tenses. 

“God’s sake, didn’t I _tell_ you where he’d be?”

 _What,_ Diego thinks flatly.

Then he remembers. The alley he’d found Luther in, the one he’d landed in, the one each and every one of his siblings had probably landed in. She’d been there, she’d seen it, she’d heard them talking…

The Commission is hunting his family. They're hunting them, and they've started rounding them up, and he's no exception.

 _I’m an idiot,_ he thinks, _to even consider working with her, with them. To think they might make an exception for me._

“... Well you ought to have been _clearer_ about that, Gene, honestly! And has he done it? No? Didn’t I say you should put _me_ on his account? No, I don’t fucking care if you think I ‘take it too personally,’ Gene, he killed my mother for God’s sake! Of all your agents, I’m the one who’s best suited to seeing it through, and he’d _better_ be my payment for this, I’ll have you know I’m still delivering you one of them...”

There’s a white, buzzing noise in Diego’s mind. 

Mother, she’d said, Five had killed her mother.

Diego’s heart drops into his gut. 

He thinks back, to all her starry praise of her mother, back in Shineyview. To how broken she’d sounded when she’d spoken of her death.

Diego thinks of his own mother, and he knows instantly what he’d do if someone had killed her.

 _She wants him dead,_ he thinks. _She wants Five dead. She’s going to kill him._

He can’t let that happen.

Diego has a habit of feeding himself to abusive institutions; when he’d left home, he’d crawled out the jaws of one, and into the next, crying out, _take me, take me,_ and he’d been on the verge of doing the same here. He’s so ready to be digested by them, so long as they stroke his ego and tell him he’s the most special meal they’ve ever had.

 _Well,_ he thinks. _This one won’t._

Diego throws the door open, and decides to make the Commission vomit him right out. 

Lila’s feathery hair whips as she turns her head, but he’s already taken a knife into his hand, already flicked it out of his fingers, already sent it sailing square towards the middle of her forehead and...

He misses.

Diego blinks, his mouth hanging open like that of a fish.

No, he hasn’t made a mistake somehow-- he’s _missed,_ and the knife is embedded in the sickly green wallpaper just shy of her head.

 _What?_ Diego thinks, _I didn’t…_

Lila smiles at him. 

He hesitates, just for a moment.

And in that moment, Lila drops the phone, and lunges at him.

She slams the heavy toe of her boot into his gut, kicking the wind from his chest, sending him sailing backwards. Lila catches the chain around his neck as he falls, and it snaps, a second before he slams through a glass table.

Diego thwacks his head into the floor, and there’s nothing.

* * *

Vanya’s feet still ache from last night.

Possessed by the urgent urge to escape, she had traveled long and far, running until her lungs threatened to burst and there was an awful grinding pain in her side, and then walking well beyond the point where she’d lost feeling in her legs. 

She had no idea where she was, knowing no routes through the labyrinth of streets she’d tossed herself out into. She did know that she couldn’t stop, that she’d have to steal through alleyways and side-streets, cutting through parks and backyards, until she was a safe enough distance away.

Terrified, Vanya had judged that the only suitable distance to consider even remotely safe was one that brought her out of the city itself. There were eyes everywhere in the city, and someone would surely be looking for her. 

Looking for her.

Funny, how people only started doing that at the worst time, and for the worst reasons.

Vanya had a lot of time to mull over that thought, as she walked. 

She’d walked and walked and walked.

It’d taken most of the night to walk out of the city. She hadn’t come to the end of the maze; now, the walls were made of corn, rather than brick. But she’d come far enough that she’d felt pretty confident about not attracting anything more than the occasional stare from a passing car. 

By the time the sky had begun bluing, Vanya was tired all the way down to her bones, and the chill had seeped in to stay. Her rain-drenched dress had gone from soaked to damp. She couldn’t feel her toes, couldn’t feel her fingertips, felt herself beginning to wobble off the side of the road, as she walked like a zombie.

Then, from the end of the road, came the car. 

Vanya squinted into the scouring glare of the headlights, bright as the eyes of a monster, and she’d shuffled off to walk on the shoulder, but the car had done something that none of the others that’d passed her had done.

It stopped. 

The man inside took a look at her, offering her a ride.

And Vanya, for lack of any other option, had climbed in.

He turned around, taking her back along the road he’d come in on, and Vanya kept him in the corner of her eyes at all times. His hands didn’t appear greasy, and they weren’t roaming towards her yet, but if they do, she’d be ready. She’s far more dangerous than he, and if he tried anything, she would kill him.

Vanya had spent the duration of the drive eerily awake, hyper-aware of the blood pumping in her ears, the rattle of the gravel under the tires, the rustle of the rubbery corn leaves, the rumble of the engine beneath her bare feet.

The engine. It’s growl had stuck in the inside of her skull, drawing up the awful memories of the last time a car engine had been caught in the crosshairs of her power. 

And she’d cried all the way back to his house.

When they pulled up to the squat yellow ranch house, Vanya felt that flash of fear again, that creeping sense of _he’s-going-to-kill-me,_ which had drained away when she realized that he wasn’t alone at all; he had a wife, who was stepping out onto the porch, drawing her housecoat tighter around herself, wondering why he’d come back instead of heading in to Dallas to purchase something. 

Vanya had been taken inside, had been weighed down by a dozen blankets, and plied with hot coffee, which she accepted leadenly. 

She decided she’d let them draw their own conclusions, about how exactly she’d come to be wandering on the side of a country road, barefoot in the middle of November.

And the conclusion that Carl and Sissy Cooper had drawn was that Vanya was the victim of a terrible boyfriend, who’d driven her out in the middle of nowhere and then abandoned her as revenge in a domestic dispute.

“Truly awful,” Sissy had sighed, “Leaving you without even your shoes.” 

And Vanya had nodded wanly. The ringing in her ear’s gone now, but the silence is still something she has to get used to; she’s tilting her head oddly, craning it towards her when she speaks. 

The Coopers had decided that she may stay for a few hours, to rest, to call her family so they might retrieve her, and Vanya had thanked them quietly. 

She had been given the couch, so she might rest, and Vanya, despite how tightly-wound her nerves were, simply couldn’t keep her eyes open the second she’d laid back on it. 

She wakes late in the morning, and in her groggy exploration of the Cooper home, discovers that they have a son, who doesn’t seem particularly interested in her, which suits her just fine; Vanya’s worked with children for most of her life, but she’s never been particularly good at it, and mostly only did it because she couldn’t afford to pass up the work. 

Sissy introduces the boy, Harlan, to her, she smiles politely at him, and then she’s drawn into the master bedroom, where Sissy digs through her closet and insists upon helping her find something new to wear, on washing the ruined dress Vanya had arrived in. 

Vanya, eager to tear off the scratchy, too-large dress she’d been provided during her imprisonment, had obliged, and this is how she finds herself in a clean white blouse and a pair of work jeans she has to roll at the ankle to account for her height, and a belt she needs to tighten as tautly as possible to keep from sliding off her narrow hips. She’s given a pair of Sissy’s shoes to borrow, but they’re the wrong size, and keep flicking off of her heels when she walks, so she keeps her steps close to the ground. 

Sissy shows her the bathroom, which is clean and pink-tiled and neat, with a line of lipsticks lined neatly up against the edge of the counter. She offers her the use of their shower, and Vanya declines. She doesn’t want to take anything off, doesn’t want to be vulnerable in a strange place with strange people. And while Sissy’s been kind, and Carl has at least been hospitable, she doesn’t know them well enough, and she won’t know them well enough. Vanya doesn’t intend to stay here, only to rest, before she moves on.

She doesn’t know where, to be honest. She’s just going to have to figure it out. 

Vanya declines the shower, and the hairbrush Sissy offers her. She’s alright with having mud streaked on her feet and in her hair, if it means she doesn’t have to look at herself in the mirror for a while.

Sissy takes another look at her hair, now in a ragged silver-white tangle, but she doesn’t say anything about it. She and Carl had been staring at it last night, but they’d been polite enough to know not to ask. Vanya’s grateful; she doesn’t know exactly how she’s going to explain it.

Vanya answers Sissy’s questions, of which there are many, with blunt yeses and nos and I-don’t-knows, and lets her make her breakfast, watching the process of the food’s making very carefully. She concludes that it hasn't been poisoned, drugged or tampered with, and that it is therefore safe to eat. 

It’s taking a while to decide if she likes her or not. She knows, in a vague sense, that Sissy’s care is genuine. That the reason why she is hovering around Vanya like a bird is that she’s so excited to have someone to speak to, that she’s deeply lonely. Sissy’s kindness is quite welcome, but Vanya simply doesn’t trust it; her heart has grown calloused in the past few weeks. Too much has happened to it, and now she looks at the kind smile of a stranger, especially the sort of smile that Sissy is giving her, with suspicion prickling in the back of her mind, an expectation that it is a crocodile smile, one that’ll be used to draw her in and trap her here, alone and dependent on false affection and giving more love than she'll ever receive, and pretending to not be who she is for fear of being abandoned, forever beholden to excuses about why she _simply can't leave, don't you see? How I can't do a single thing without your help? Don't you see how much I_ need _you..._

Anyway.

Her husband, however… well. He’s polite enough, but Vanya had adopted an instant dislike of the man. It’d started in the car, but it cements itself when he won’t shut up already about his brother being a State Trooper, a fact that he is inanely proud of and keeps repeating over breakfast, that Vanya could truly care less about. Vanya peers back and forth between the two of them, watching them exchange words over their meal, and thinks, rather coldly, _you should leave him._

She can’t afford to keep putting off calling someone now. She’s rested, she’s changed, she’s eaten, and now the Coopers will be expecting it of her, so Vanya shuffles woodenly to the phone, and pretends to dial her family. 

Vanya flicks the rotary around and around in a nonsense pattern, then pauses the standard few seconds. 

She has called no one, and she greets no one. Then, she hums and nods to the buzz of the dial tone, pretending to listen to a nonexistent relative. She stiltedly explains her lie to the drone, that _yes, I was dropped off in the middle of nowhere, yes, how terrible, yes, I would like to be picked up._ She thanks the silence awkwardly, and _clangs_ the phone back onto the receiver, staring down at it for a moment. 

It’s quiet for a moment. She can hear the soft humming of Harlan’s records in the other room, and the buzzing of a soap on the television. 

“They coming soon?” asks Carl, “Father? Brother? Husband?”

“Yes.” Vanya lies calmly. “Yes, they’ll be here in an hour or so. Thank you.”

 _No one knows where I am,_ she thinks. _No one is coming._

The thought makes her chest seize up in a deep, consuming sadness. 

“I could drive you into town, if you like,” offers Sissy. “I wouldn’t mind, honestly. It’d be nice to head into the city for a day. We could take my son.”

Vanya shakes her head mutely. She can’t go back into the city, people’ll be looking for her there. 

“No,” she mumbles, then louder: “No. They’re coming for me. I need to go home.” 

Home. She wants to go home, she wants to go back to the future...

Back to her family.

Vanya frowns. 

She thinks about home, about the mountain of rubble she’d made of the family house, about the blood in her former boyfriend’s bathtub, about that night onstage, and how the moon had shone brighter and brighter and brighter. She’d dreamed about the moon last night, about reaching out with a blue-shining finger and bored a hole right through its center.

And Diego had said something about home, something about the moon, hadn’t he?

 _He said that I destroyed the moon,_ Vanya recalls, _That I destroyed the world._

It wasn’t a dream, was it?

Vanya goes and sits on the couch, uncertainly, the way a guest who’d only just arrived at the house would, and she peers out the window. There’s a scattering of clouds on the horizon, and the way the trees are going orange at the edges, it looks as if their leaves are catching fire, rippling as the wind threads its way through it. 

_I destroyed the world,_ she thinks, _Five said the world ended that week, when he’d come back, and I hadn’t thought anything of it, but it did. And I did it. I caused the apocalypse._

Vanya bites her lip, and sniffles a bit.

 _That’s why they’d teleported us all here,_ she realizes. _They weren’t trying to kill me at all. They had nowhere else to go. They had to leave, and they… they brought me with them._

She recalls Diego, blurry in her memory, but there, taking her hand and not dragging her behind him, but urging her along with him.

At once she feels terrible, for having left him behind. 

Her vision’s blurry, filling with hot tears. Vanya rubs the heels of her hands over her eyes and sighs. 

She looks out again, to the clear blue sky, to the ripples in the grass carved by a gust of cold autumn wind.

She wants to go outside, she decides suddenly. She wants to go out, and to be alone, because she can’t think properly with the sound of daytime soaps buzzing in the background.

Vanya shuffles into the kitchen, stopping where the tile borders the carpet and lining her toes up against that border, folding her hands in front of her, like she’s a child asking permission to play outside. 

“I’d like to go for a walk,” she says, her voice husky from underuse, and they look at her oddly, so she repeats herself: “I’d like to go take a walk around the farm.”

“Here,” says Sissy, springing up, her blonde hair flashing. “I’ll come with you, I can show you--”

“No,” Vanya says, blunter than she’d meant to. “No,” she tries again, softer, “I need to be alone. I need to think about some things.”

“About that man of yours?” grins Carl.

“Yes,” Vanya replies flatly, watching his smile fade at the sight of her blank face.

“Well, here, let me get you a coat,” Sissy says, making her way over to a closet near the door, and rifling through it.

As she does, Vanya stops by the bathroom. She uses the toilet, and as she’s drying her hands with a lotus-patterned towel, she pauses, staring at the line of lipsticks stacked like a line of toy soldiers against the mirror.

Vanya picks one at random, smearing a bit of it over her mouth. It gives her a little thrill when she tries it on, like a strange, secret sort of kiss. 

At the door, she accepts the baggy black peacoat Sissy offers her, tugging it on, and she waits a moment, letting Sissy’s gaze linger on her lips, letting her realize what she’s done, letting her know, in a small sort of way, that she knows what the looks she keeps shooting her mean. 

Vanya’s lips curl up in a half-smile, as she reaches for the door, and then she’s outside, in the midday light, the pleasant chill pressing in around her, lifting her up and setting her spine straight.

No one tries to follow her as she leaves. Vanya hears the television buzzing, trumpeting the theme for _As The World Turns,_ just before she lets the door shut with a definitive _slam_ behind her. 

She walks down the long gravel driveway, along the side of the road. No one’s driving along it, and no one will be for a while. There’s no one out here but her, and in the distance, a train is snaking across the horizon. 

The wind picks up, a sharp, chilled gust that catches her by surprise, making her tremble with a childish sort of thrill, one that makes her want to let it shake her inside out.

She doesn’t look back, as she walks away. She knows, in a strangely certain way, that she won’t be coming back. There’d be no point; eventually, they would begin to wonder why the family she said would be coming for her aren’t, and that would lead to questions she won’t want to answer.

So, she’s walking again. Fine.

She’s directionless, weaving off the path and over a hill, picking her feet through high grass that tickles at her shins, making for the tight green walls of the cornfield ahead. She’s totally alone, with no one but her thoughts for company, so she indulges them, and she gets to thinking once she’s sheltered by the shaded rows.

About that night, at the Icarus. About how she’d climbed up onto that stage and decided she would never leave it, that she would finish her concert, and draw her bow across her throat. How overcome she’d been, how she’d felt like her heart would simply collapse under the weight of it all, how there’d been another sort of apocalypse, inside herself, one she’d been so hungry to feed herself to. 

But she’s still here. 

She hadn’t planned to be, but she is. The doomsday clock has run past midnight, and the world may not still be here, but Vanya is. She’s here, and she has no idea what to do after the storm has ended, after the pain will ebb away.

She’s _here,_ and now that she’s clear of mind and not shackled in a basement somewhere, she’s remembering the maze that she’d lost herself in before her abduction. She’s still there, wandering the post-apocalypse of her own mind, still searching in vain for a way out. And now, the paths aren’t so twisted anymore. Now, she knows what she went wandering into it in the first place looking for, what is waiting at the exit for her. 

She’s still unafraid of it, still certain that even though she’s empty-handed, without map nor string nor sword, she will find a way to navigate it. It’s hers after all, it’s inside of her own heart, and it’s meant for her. 

_Maybe,_ Vanya thinks, _I’ve been approaching this all wrong; the way out is at the center, and all I’ve ever had to do is travel all the way in._

At the thought, something deep and tectonic shifts in her, something that rouses in her a deep conviction to see it through, something that makes her swell, suddenly lighter, suddenly light enough to lift off the ground.

She has to figure herself out, and she thinks she knows how. She's tried it before, but she'd been interrupted; now, totally alone, she can see this through to the end.

Vanya makes her way deep into the cornfield, and once she’s at the center, she draws in a deep breath, closes her eyes, throws out her senses, and spreads her web wide and far: there’s the skittering of mice in the cornfield, the drone of a passing pickup truck, the creak of a weather vane, the sputtering of the television inside the Cooper house as an emergency bulletin interrupts the soap opera, the distant hum of Harlan’s records, the metallic whirring of the train sawing against the tracks, the high wolfish cry of the wind, the drumbeat of her own heart…

She could take any one of them, take it into herself, send it out as a gentle ripple in the stalks around her, as placid and soft as a stone skipping across a still pond.

But Vanya doesn’t want _gentle._ She doesn't want _placid_ or _soft._ It won’t be enough to satisfy the storm gathering in her, the one she knows she must weather if she's going to reach the center of her maze and confront what's at the heart of it.

She chooses the sharp slashing of the wind, and opts instead for a tidal wave.

* * *

Five wakes in the Rofas’ backyard, with alcohol sloshing in his mouth, the taste of ash on his tongue, an awful pounding in his head, and no clear indication as to how exactly he’d gotten here.

So. Not paradox psychosis, just a garden-variety hangover.

His bad. 

He grunts, pulling himself with much effort off of the grass, and then, the moment he’s on his feet, he promptly keels over and fertilizes the Rofas’ garden. He can almost hear Delores chiding him for immediately throwing himself down the neck of a bottle, but she’s not even here, so it can’t be her voice he’s hearing in his head right now. 

It takes a second, for his bearings to return to him, for him to realize how much time he’s lost, that he has a brother and sister who are likely wandering downtown Dallas, looking for him.

He jumps back to Dealey, and uses his bony elbows to shove his way through the ocean of people surging every which way. It’s maybe two hours since the assassination at most, and he’s got no idea if Allison and Luther are even here but... 

He finds the car, abandoned and unlocked. 

His gut clenches.

He jumps, this time to the Knoll. And finds Allison’s purse on the concrete, spilling odds and ends across the lot. And he knows, instantly, what must have happened, what must be happening to each of his siblings, all across the city. 

His family is in danger, and he has no idea how to find them.

 _What a mess,_ he thinks, _what a mess I’ve made._

Five jumps again, back to the Rofas’, and he begins rooting through the house like a madman. They must have it buried somewhere around here... 

He hears the shuffling gait of Hazel, entering the room, sighing in indulgent exhaustion at the sight of him, before saying, “So I take it things didn’t go well.”

“Obviously not,” Five snaps.

“Well, then I take it you’re looking for this?”

Five turns.

Hazel, still in his housecoat, is nursing a mug of steaming coffee in one hand, holding up a weathered black briefcase with the other. “Haven’t used it since we first got here, and frankly, I don’t plan on doing so,” he explains.

Five stares at it, itching to fly across the basement and snatch it, but he holds himself back. What he’s offering is enormous, is literally worldchanging, and if Five takes it, he’s probably never going to bring it back.

“Are you sure?” 

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

Five reaches out, and takes it.

The weight hauls his shoulder down towards the ground, and Five winces, catching the thing before it can smash his toes.

“Listen, it’s, uh, pretty low on power. I can’t exactly charge it anywhere but the Home Office, and that’s not exactly an option.”

Five sighs. Of course, the briefcase only has enough juice for a trip or two. Fine. “Well, I’m just going to have to be sparing with it.”

“I’m not going to see you again, am I?” asks Hazel.

“Most likely not.”

“Well,” he sighs. “It was nice, I suppose. Look after yourself, alright?” 

“Alright,” Five says, extending a hand, which Hazel takes, and shakes solemnly. “You too. Have a good life.” 

“I already have one. You should get one for yourself.”

Five nods, and then he’s off.

He has no time for sentiment, not when it’s on him to save everyone. He feels strangely vulnerable, without them, and he must gather them together as quickly as possible.

It seems likely that the Commission has taken Allison, and since Luther is attached to her hip, him as well. And Five hasn’t the slightest idea where Klaus and Diego are, let alone if they’re together, nor does he have any idea where to begin searching for them.

But Vanya…

He has to find her. He has to get her, and bring her home. He’s adrift, and he needs her to anchor him. But aside from that, Allison and Luther had told him about her, about her wild display of power. And if Vanya’s loose in Dallas, untrained and strong enough to crush the world to dust… well. He has a theory as to how he might be able to locate her.

Five locates the nearest weather station with half-functional radar, and invites himself inside. No one’s paying attention; the president’s just died, after all, and no one could really care about a gangly teenager in schoolboy shorts lugging a cumbersome briefcase through the halls. And he takes a look at the radar.

There’s a storm forming just east of Dallas, when today’s forecast is due to be warm and pleasant, if a little windy.

Vanya’s power, from what he’s seen of it, has something to do with sound, something to do with whipping it into energy that had behaved as the wind does, energy powerful enough to destroy the world, so probably powerful enough to shake up the clouds, and whip up a storm that shouldn’t exist. 

He gambles on it, noting the coordinates and jumping for it.

He lands somewhere rural, nothing but a patchwork of fields for corn and livestock. And the sky’s smeared gray at the edges, green-black towards the horizon, where the wind is moaning in from. All around him, branches are creaking, the last of the leaves ripping right off the trees and dancing in a whirl of green and gold. 

Ahead of him, the clouds are starting to rotate.

He jumps again, and again, and finally, he comes upon a cornfield that’s been utterly obliterated, acres and acres of tall stalks pressed flat against the earth in a starburst. 

And in the middle of it all, he sees her, wild-haired and hunched over like a banshee, screaming her grief and her fury to the world, demanding that they hear her. Even from this far away, he can tell that she’s glowing.

Seeing her is… nice. Oh, it’s _nice._ Something in him settles at the sight of her, at the assurance that he’s found his family, but more than that, he’s found his favorite person, and she’s alive and unharmed. A tiny discordant piece of the universe has at last settled into place, and he can breathe just a bit easier.

Five sets down the briefcase, and he sits on it for a moment, leaning on his knees to observe her. The wind whips at his hair, and slices past his face, and the rain lashes down on his back, soaking him to the bone.

Thunder is cracking overhead, and Vanya seems to be catching it, letting it pound a drumbeat into the earth, leaving an indentation like a giant’s fist. He’s so far away that he can’t make out a single one of her facial features, but somehow he knows she’s crying. The wind is howling so loudly that if he were to open his mouth and yell, the sound would be lost to the noise, yet he can tell that in the middle of the gale, she’s screaming, that it is her scream that he’s hearing in the heart of the wind. That the wind might not even be wind at all, but her power, or that it’s threaded through with it so thoroughly that he cannot tell the difference. 

Five looks at her, and thinks of the last time he’d seen her, of the promise he’d made to her, to himself, to their family. The idea of setting the broken planes of her mind in order again had been a little juvenile, he knows; it’d been a child’s wish, the wish of a little boy who wanted to come home, but he refuses to believe it had been wrong. 

Instead, as he watches her carve deep scars into the earth, scars that take on a distinct shape, he recognizes her outburst for what it is: she’s _training._ Vanya is taking the strangely uneven curve of her power, and learning to whip it around her in a vicious circle. 

She hasn’t lost control at all; if anything, she’s found it, all on her own. 

All she had needed was time, and here, stranded in the past, she had found it. 

A part of him wants to race across the field, to touch Vanya, to prove to himself that she’s real and not just some strange fever dream brought on by the near-breaking of his mind. A part of Five wants to leave her be, to let her scream for a while; the thought that timid little Vanya is capable of such destruction, and that she has found a way to take that chaos into herself and make it her own fills him with a deep, ferocious sort of pride, and he feels it would be a terrible transgression, to impose upon her experimentation, a transgression she'd be well within her rights to strike him down for, like a vengeful god.

But their family needs them, and they are running out of time. So Five rises to his feet, tugs the case out of the mud, and starts across the field towards her.

* * *

Diving deep into herself, staring all the pain and misery and loneliness in the eye, had proven to be excruciatingly painful. Vanya has been out here for an hour, or perhaps a minute, or perhaps a day, she can’t tell; the sky’s too dark to tell time by. It could be midday or midnight, for all she cares. She had been far too busy crying herself empty to care.

The idea was that she’d let out all her negative emotions, that she’d call them down in a scourge upon this field, and then, free of them, she’d be light and free.

She just didn’t expect for there to be so _many_ of them.

Vanya flattened the corn to the earth, then dragged the clouds down to make the world as miserable as she felt. Her power is not one of weather manipulation, she’s learned, or rather, it’s not one _exactly;_ the extent to which she controls it is limited to sending her powers up and up into the atmosphere, to beat at the clouds until they dropped whatever precipitation they’d had, or else to take the pounding of the rain or the thrum of thunder and use it to charge her. Even the wind isn’t a true wind, but is simply the way that she’s shaped the energy she’s whipped up out of the thunder’s cry. 

She can’t exactly control the weather, but she can shake the sky until she whips a storm out of it, and it is this storm that she pulls down and over her, so the sky might show the world exactly how she feels.

This wrapped up in her power, Vanya is hyper-aware of everything; the pounding of her heart, the heaving of her lungs as she hiccuped distressed breaths, the rush of blood in her ears, the tiny skittering feet of animals fleeing the cornfield, the rustle of leaves that hadn’t been flattened to the mud yet, the deafening howl of the wind. 

And so, when a second heartbeat had flickered into existence at the edge of her senses, she’d taken notice. When the steady plodding of a familiar world-weary gait begins making its way slowly, yet determinedly, towards her, she takes notice. Vanya doesn’t lift the veil of wind separating the two of them, but she also doesn’t give it a razor’s edge. She wants to see if he’ll keep coming. She wants him to prove he will.

He does.

Five can hardly keep himself upright in the strength of the winds she’s kicked up, but he keeps walking, digging his heels deeper into the mud, then his hands when he’s caught in the eyewall.

Her eyes, blue-white and blazing like stars in her shadowed face, are visible long before the rest of her is. She’s gone preternaturally still, watching him with a tilted head, like she’s an inquisitive wolf and he’s approaching her in the midst of feeding.

 _Are you stupid,_ she’s thinking, _don’t you know what’ll happen when you get close enough for me to bite you?_

But she lets him approach. A part of him wonders if it’s because she’s decided to humor him for his bravery. A part of him hopes that she remembers him in a delicate, diaphanous way that he keeps struggling to put into words, for fear that they’ll be seized and corrupted, and turned against him.

He is right on both counts. 

Then, he’s passed into the eye of her storm, and he’s close enough to reach out and touch her, if he’s so inclined. Smartly, he is not. 

“You found me,” she says, almost reverently.

“I did,” he replies, wiping his muddy hands on his shorts, and setting the briefcase down. There’s the ghost of a smile on his face, but it’s gone so quickly she can’t tell if it was ever actually there, or if she’d dreamed it up.

Vanya has been thinking a lot about the end of the world, here in her cocoon of sound, and so she brings it up now. Five is the expert on the apocalypse, and he of all people should be able to set to stone the question that she’d been wavering back and forth on, knowing the truth yet unable to shake off the plausible deniability that maybe, she’d just dreamt it up.

“Is it true?” she asks. “Did I destroy the world?”

His brow twists. He seems pained, that she knows.

“You were the one who caused it, yes,” Five says carefully, “But we all had a hand in it. You’d never have gotten there if we hadn’t pushed you.” 

Five had been single-minded, Vanya recalls, in his pursuit of the cause of the end. He’d chosen it over her. She finds it ironic, that after all this time, his path had only ever been a circle, which had led him all the way back to her.

“Are you here to kill me?”

 _Oh,_ he thinks wearily. _I could never do that._

“No.”

Vanya searches the contents of his face, boring deeply into him with her luminous gaze, and she judges him to be truthful. Her face is so bright, so white, so blinding, it’s like he’s staring into the face of the full moon. It _hurts_ to look at her, but he knows he must, so he refuses to look away.

“I’m here to help you,” he insists, “All of us are.”

Vanya winces, lowering her head to let her hair fall in front of her face in soaked silver-white ropes. She’s thinking of that night, at the Icarus, and her memory of it is clearer than ever. She recalls the living music, the screams, the receding tide of the crowd, the blizzard of bullets, the explosion in her ear.

“We made a mistake,” he says.

Vanya exhales sharply through her nose. 

“I know,” she replies, tilting her head towards him again. She’d counted each of her living brothers, save him, caught in her web. Which leaves Five and Allison unaccounted for. “Someone shot me. Was that you?” 

Five’s brow twists painfully.

 _It was,_ she gathers. Of course it was. It makes perfect sense that it’d been him. 

“I can’t hear,” Vanya brushes her hair away from her ear. “From this side.”

He winces.

Vanya’s moonlike face darkens, with something a step removed from rage. “My power’s not the same, you know. I have only half of it, now. Did you do that on purpose? Was I _too much_ for you?” She scoffs, shaking her head, and there’s a razor’s edge lancing through her words. “You know, I realize that if I never ended the world, if I’d had no powers, like I thought I did for so long, that none of you would have ever come looking for me, would you? You’re only chasing after me now because you’re worried that I… That I’ll _what?”_

It’s a rhetorical question, one she’s smiling mockingly at, waiting for Five to answer.

He doesn’t. There’s no need to. They both know what he’d say, _destroy the world,_ so there’s no need to say it.

Suddenly, Five becomes keenly aware of his heart, beating in his chest, of the chill of an invisible hand, passing intangibly through his chest, wrapping its fingers around the organ and taking it gently into its grasp. 

He knows Vanya’s doing it. He can tell by the way her lamplike eyes fix on his chest, the way her mouth parts slightly. And in some strange way, it electrifies him, knowing that if she so chose to, she could squeeze it, exploding it into pulp within his chest. 

Which makes it all the more fascinating when she lets go.

“Did you ever consider that it would be me?” she asks.

He sighs, hanging his head. “No.”

He hadn’t considered her at all. So much had happened, because of his failure to do so.

Vanya turns away, and he’s freed from the lunar sharpness of her face, able to gaze upon it in profile, as she stares out at the devastated cornfield, up at the sickly dark clouds spinning above them, frozen in the beginnings of a cyclone.

“I never…” Her voice gets caught in her chest. She has to start again: “I never wanted to do that. To destroy the world, I mean. But I wouldn’t have cared at all, if the world had ended though.” She isn’t sure why she’s telling him that, why it matters so much that he know it. 

But it’s true. From the moment her concert had been interrupted, the world had only been as large as her pain… or, her pain had been as large as the world, had been larger than the world, had been large enough to swallow it whole.

“But,” she says quietly, “I _did_ want to kill them.”

She isn’t totally sure why the distinction between Five and the rest of them matters so much, only that it does, and that she must acknowledge it. 

Five takes it all in quietly, and thinks of how stupid they’ve all been. The world had been so _easy_ to save, and they’d still failed, because they couldn’t have been bothered to stop and listen.

“Vanya, we want to help you, he insists. “With _all_ of this.”

Vanya makes a soft, wounded little noise. He can’t tell if it’s the start of a sob, or of a laugh.

“You really think I’m worth _all_ that trouble?” Vanya challenges disbelievingly, “You think I can be helped?”

Five thinks of what she’s done. Of Allison’s pulse, beating weakly in his hands. Of the butchered corpse of her former lover, lying alone in an empty house. Of Pogo and Grace, dead and buried deep in the rubble of the house. Of his brothers, twisted and twitching as they were drained of life, and Vanya, staring up at them, empty-eyed. Of billions of people scorched alive and suffocated in moondust, of an entire planet of life snuffed out all at once. 

Five thinks of Vanya. Of a curtain of smooth straight hair swinging as she rounds a corner especially quickly. Of sweet smiles and prodding looks stolen secretively at mealtimes. Of sunny afternoons spent sitting, talking about nothing at all. Of wry humor that matched him hit for hit. Of threads of silvery music, whispering through the house. Of careful, calloused hands that cleaned him up when he bled. Of words that had been so powerful that they’d reached across time itself to anchor him to his sanity in his years alone.

“Of _course_ you can,” he says, believing it with everything he has. “I think you’re worth helping.”

He’s taken a step closer to her, without meaning to. 

The strength of his convictions sways her, uprooting her from where her feet had come stuck in the mud. Vanya opens her mouth in surprise, but then tenses. 

Beyond them, there’s a tiny flash; light reflecting off of glass, of steel. Vanya tilts her head, to get a better look, and Five follows her gaze. 

There’s a line of cars, no, _police cars,_ puttering their way along the grid of country roads towards them. They’re still so far that Vanya can’t make out a single thing about them, other than the lights flashing on their roofs, yet she can instantly tell that they’re the state troopers Carl had been lording about at the table. She knows instantly that he’d called them.

And honestly, she probably should’ve expected something like this. A strange woman blows in with the wind, looking like a specter, with a story full of holes and a Russian name and a dress that looks eerily like a prison uniform, who has a conversation with a family she needs to reunite with but neglects to give the address of the house she’s staying at, and then vanishes a few minutes after the president’s shot. 

So. They’re coming for her. They’ll pass by the field in a moment, but they’ll circle back eventually. Her handiwork is too notable to miss.

 _When they do..._ she thinks, unsurprised at all by the ferocity boiling in her, unsurprised by the way the winds sharpen around her, the way she doesn’t feel the least bit guilty, at the thought of grinding their cars like tin cans underfoot, until the blood leaks out and soaks the soil. That’s just what _happens,_ when you stumble upon a pair of gods fighting; a divine wind sweeps down and plucks you up and makes you sorry you’d ever imposed on something so _extraordinary--_

“Vanya.”

Five’s afraid of her-- no, he’s _moralizing._ Isn’t that _rich?_

“Vanya, don’t test me right now,” he warns, stepping in front of her, his fists flashing blue and shining, preparing to jump.

 _To where,_ she wants to laugh, drunk for a lightning-flash of a second on her own fierceness, how wonderful a feeling, to look at someone with such indifference that you could crush them between your fingers and feel nothing but the vague sort of disgusted satisfaction one gets from smashing an insect under the heel of their boot. _You’ll leap to them, and I’ll crush you too. You leap to me, and I blast you into atoms._ “Funny, I was about to say the same thing.”

He’s close enough to her now to see the smear of pink on her lip, smeared by the rain down to her chin. His mouth goes dry at the sight of it. 

The cars speed past.

They’ll be back, Vanya knows, and she expects that Five does too. 

Now they are alone again, and the flash of bloodlust that had coursed through her for a second is gone, but that seething, rotting anger’s still here. It’s still _here,_ and…

And it’s directed at _him,_ isn’t it?

And she knows why.

“You ran away,” she snarls.

“I didn’t...” Five chokes on his words, considering them. _Run away_ is the wrong term for what he’d done; _run away_ implies an intent to leave permanently. And the thing is, Five never intended to _stay_ gone. He’d intended to show off, to impress Dad and Vanya and their siblings, to prove he really _was_ as good as he said he was. “I always intended to come back,” he insists, “I never thought I… I didn’t think it would take this long.” 

Vanya can’t look at him; she turns away again, staring off at the bright line of blue sky on the horizon, folding her arms protectively around her middle. 

“You still left.”

 _When I leave_ , Five had once said, when they were thirteen and pouring over the possibility of time travel, _I’ll take you with me_. Like she was a suitcase, to be picked up and carried out of the house under his arm. Vanya often thought of those words, wondering if it had been a throwaway remark, if he remembers it at all. Sometimes, she resented the thought that she might be a thing to be dragged about, sometimes she wanted so badly to be held that she knew she’d have taken it as a compliment with stars in her eyes. At first, it would make her ready to cry, but as the years dragged on, the tears dried up, and were replaced by a deep, consuming bitterness that would cling to her like an unwelcome poltergeist. 

“You left me _alone.”_

He left her, right when the schism between her and the Academy had exploded in size and depth, right when his company would have mattered most. Vanya looks back at the road map of her life, tracing each path she’d been sent down, and she knows with absolute certainty that if he had stayed, she wouldn't have been spurred towards the apocalypse.

Five barks out a quick, awful laugh. “Vanya, if you’ll recall, _I_ was alone too. I was the only person alive in the world because of _you._ We’ve both been punished for it. Why are you so _hung up_ on this?”

It isn’t enough.

It isn’t enough, and the anger just keeps _coming,_ keeps shivering in her heart, because Five was her only friend, her truest friend, the one person who she was able to say without a shadow of a doubt genuinely cared for her, who listened to her and didn’t make snide comments when she’d show him her progress on her violin. He’d been the only bright spot of sunshine in a house full of shadows, and he left her, taking the light with him. 

He’d left her, and he’d provoked in her a feeling, raw as a wound, that might’ve scabbed over with time, but never healed. It’d always been a point of extreme tenderness for her, an ever-present reminder of a place she aches to return to, where she could have been cared for. And in returning, he had torn it open, and now here they are, neck-deep in the blood it’s spilled. 

Now, Vanya admits to herself what that wound is, why it’s taken so long to name it; it’d been a feeling, clouded by years of medication and years of reproach: Vanya had been starting to love him, when he’d left, and he’d haunted her ever since. She’s angry with him, because she loved him, because she _still_ loves him.

“We were best friends,” she says, stopping herself before she can say any more. It’s too delicate, too special, and she’s too used to having special things ripped away from her.

He should know the rest, and he does, in a way; he read her book religiously, he’d read each and every line, and he’d read between each and every line, and he might not _know_ it, but he _hopes_ for it.

“We still could be,” he replies, meaning far more.

Five had left, this is true, but then he’d come back. 

He’d come back for the apocalypse.

 _But,_ Vanya realizes, _I am the cause of the apocalypse, so he came back for me._

She clings to that thought so tightly her knuckles whiten; _she_ had brought him back. Vanya had reached out into the universe, and she had drawn him back to her, back home. If her young self only knew that all those sandwiches and lights switched on and late-night vigils weren’t in vain at all, that her cries would be answered, if she would only wait. 

And if she had brought him home, then surely he can do the same for her. 

Vanya had been out here, in the middle of nowhere, in the center of her maze, discovering that the walls confining her had always been glossy, that the maze had been prismatic all along, with so many ways to look at her own pain, so she’d taken it and let it out, in the hopes that if she vented it all, she would at last find that missing thing that would set her free. She’s perched at the edge of the way out, but she cannot climb out of it, not until she determines what she is going to do and who she is going to be after this storm she’s created ends.

She looks at Five, and she thinks she has her answer.

She’s coming back.

The aggressive luminosity radiating from Vanya’s skin settles, fading until she’s back to her normal pallor, and the moons in her eyes blink away, replaced by deep, soft brown. 

Above them, the clouds tear open, the eye of the storm opening to reveal a brilliant shade of blue, bathing them in a spotlight of sun. All around them, the rain turns to strands of falling crystal, and then it stops falling at all.

“Will you take me home?” Vanya asks quietly, “I’d like to go home.”

“I will,” he promises, reaching down to pluck the case off the ground, “But first, we have to get the others. They're in trouble, and they'll need us.”

Vanya hesitates. Then she nods quietly.

“You’re willing to forgive them? Given everything?”

“I’m willing to try.” 

He gives her a soft, fond smile.

“Where are they?” Vanya asks, looking off to the treeline uncertainly, as if their siblings will materialize there. “They’re not here.”

“They’ve been taken, I think.” 

“By who,” Vanya frowns. “The FBI?”

“No?” Five replies, a question laced into his tone. “The Temps Commission. If I had to guess, our family’s being held at Main Headquarters. That old fish has it out for me, and he’s likely to take it out on them to force my hand.”

Vanya blinks in confusion.

 _Right,_ he remembers, _Vanya doesn’t know about them yet. Well, we have a bit of catching up to do with each other then._

“I’ll show you." Five extends his hand.

Vanya regards it for a moment, weighing all the things it promises.

“Alright.” 

She takes his hand, and he turns the dial on the briefcase. 

By the time the sirens reach them, there’s nothing left of them but their footprints, trailing off into thin air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was cathartic.


	6. what you know is true

Five and Vanya land in the bowels of the Commission’s basement, in a closet stacked high with boxes of files. Vanya grimaces at the wave of nausea that overcomes her, opens the nearest box, and promptly vomits into it, desecrating a year’s worth of progress on the Lusitania. 

Five sighs at the plume of bluish smoke that bursts from the briefcase’s side, and tosses it aside. 

They peer out, into the hallway, wincing at the way the door creaks.

No one is here, and the only sound is that of the freeform jazz playing over the intercom speakers, echoing down the whitewashed hall after them in a manner that strikes Vanya as strangely ominous. 

They step out, into the hall, their mud-slick shoes sliding a bit on the smooth tile, but they turn that misstep into momentum, beginning to walk urgently. 

“Where are they?” Vanya asks, not daring to raise her voice above a whisper.

Five screws his brow up, and she can practically see the wheels in his head turning.

There are holding cells in a few of the campus buildings, and the most secure of them… ah, yes, he remembers.

In the Commission’s haste to make their offices as efficient as possible, they’d constructed a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the campus, to connect all the buildings. Five, who knows the layout of the campus by heart, moves swiftly through them, Vanya on his heels. 

He ducks sharply down a side hall, and she jogs to keep up with him. As they run, he gives her a terse explanation of the place they’ve traveled to, of his own involvement in working here. A part of him worries that she’ll look at him differently, when she knows what he’s done, but she simply takes the information in stride, keeping pace with him. With the week Vanya’s had, she’s open to just about anything, and being the world-destroyer, she can hardly hold him accountable for a few butcherings here and there.

And besides, this is hardly the time to moralize. 

Soon enough, they’re sprinting up a stairwell, peering through a small window embedded in a heavy door, at a sign helpfully labelled ‘Holding.’

“This it?” Vanya asks.

“Yup. We’re going to have to fight our way in.” Five peers through the window, scowling. The halls are crawling with people, which, fine, he can take them, but it’ll take so _long--_

Behind him, Vanya peers around, at a fire alarm nearby, at the shape of the hallway.

“I need a minute,” Vanya says from behind him, and he turns, to see her staring at the alarm. He gets it.

“Get around the corner,” she demands.

“I’m not hiding,” Five retorts.

“Please,” she says, a sharp edge to the tone of her voice.

He looks at her a moment, then obliges, loping down the hall and bracing himself low against the wall, with his hands clamped over his ears.

Vanya pulls the alarm. The tinny shriek of the alarm blares into Five’s eardrums, making his teeth tremble in their sockets, and he grimaces, poking his head around the corner. Vanya is catching the sound of the alarm, sending the percussive, ear-drumming blast back down the hall. The air itself wavers and warps under the weight of her power, and the door, and much of the hallway beyond it, shatters into a blizzard of splinters and chunks of stone.

Vanya sprints into the white cloud of dust kicked up by her power, and Five curses, sprinting after her. 

The walls are trembling, the ceiling cracking and bucking, glass splintering out onto the perfectly manicured lawn of the Home Office campus, but Five doesn’t pay it much mind. He keeps going, following the source of the blast, leaping over fallen bodies and dodging snatching hands. 

Then, a tumultuous boom from somewhere beneath him, intense enough to send Five sailing across the floor on his stomach. He blinks, and suddenly, half the floor has caved in, as though a sinkhole has opened up below the building. Five pulls himself to his feet, and stares out the window, at the shuddering of the other buildings, across the lawn. 

Instantly, he knows what happened.

The basement ceiling is low and scarred, raw pipes painted over with asbestos-heavy white pain running through each and every hall like veins, radiating awful heat as they pump gas across the campus. The buildings themselves, Five knows, are wildly unsafe; they’d been built solidly once, but they’d gone into a state of near-disrepair. After all, if one can simply reset the day, why bother making any repairs, or starting any renovations?

Once, he’d thought it remarkably stupid of them. Now, he’s singing their praises, because Vanya’s power, to put it simply, has set off a chain reaction that, well… The Commission only have themselves to blame, for the way their headquarters burn up so _quickly._

Vanya’s there then, yanking him by his elbow, and they’re moving again, leaping over an overturned wooden bench and--

Stopping. Dead in their tracks.

The hall ahead of them is absolutely swarming with corrections agents, armed to the teeth. 

Unbeknownst to Five, every single agent the Commission had dispatched to the field had been summoned back to Headquarters, to handle the current security crisis (including, for the record, the pair of agents that had held their weapons to the head of an unfortunate European woman who’s about to learn that being kidnapped by time-traveling assassins is only going to be her second-shittiest experience that week). 

There’s a whistling shriek from the end of the hall, and Five blanches at the sight of a rocket flaming their way towards them. He reaches for Vanya, prepares to gather enough energy to jump them, and--

\--It bursts, not a foot in front of them, but the hellish blast arcs backwards, towards the army amassed against them, as though an invisible wall had sprung up between them…

 _Oh,_ Five realizes, noting that Vanya’s beginning to glow again, advancing through the hellscape, a trail of fire and gore in her wake on her way to free their family. 

He thinks, _yeah,_ _love’s nice._

Echoing down from somewhere above him, there’s the most welcome sound he’s ever heard: **“... heard a rumor that you blew each others’ brains out...”**

Five plucks a machine gun out of the stiff fingers of a fallen agent, and sets to work spraying down the halls, as he sprints for the marble stairwell. Vanya, it seems, will be fine enough without him, and if they split up, they can find their family faster.

He flashes up a flight of stairs, but misses Allison. He is greeted instead with the grisly sight of a dozen corpses, limp atop each other in a grotesque pile clogging up the stairway landing, their heads reduced to gory nubs.

Vanya’s destruction of the building had shaken the guards from their postings, the walls from their foundations, and the cell doors confining each of the Hargreeves siblings from their hinges. Naturally, they decided to pitch in, not totally certain of what calamity was responsible for their current predicament, but quite excited to beat the everloving shit out of the people who’d trapped them all in isolation.

They start separated, wandering through disparate sections of the office. And as they converge, they set to wreaking pure havoc, as only the former child soldiers of the Umbrella Academy can.

Diego, sick of throwing shoes and staplers at his opponents, opts to stop by the armory, where he finds Klaus, cowering.

“Hey, long time no see.” Klaus says, peering down, “Where are your shoes?”

Diego glances down at his socked feet. Shrugs. “The sixties.”

“Oh. Well, alright then.” He resumes huddling behind a bench, and Diego rushes out without him. “Good... luck?”

Klaus, who’d been forced by virtue of imprisonment to sober up, is keenly aware of Ben at his shoulder. Thankfully, they have the threat of near imminent death to distract themselves with, so they put their grievances away, each individually deciding to file the very complex feelings brewing in them under Not Now. 

It isn’t just Ben, Klaus realizes; ghosts, as one well knows, are often bound to the people responsible for their deaths, especially if their deaths were of a violent nature. And the Commission, being an intertemporal assassin agency, is filled to the brim with vicious murderers. So, as one might gather, there are a _lot_ of very angry ghosts crowding the halls.

And Klaus knows _exactly_ what to do with them. 

He grits his teeth, gathers his focus, and sweat pours from his forehead.

And suddenly, the halls are teeming with brilliant blue specters, all very, very pissed off, and all clawing and beating at their killers. 

Ben, of course, is one of them, and the creature in his gut whips out of him all at once, busily and hungrily rending limb from limb. For once, Ben’s not disgusted at all by it; rather, he’s quite content to let the creature do its awful work.

Klaus stumbles out into the middle of the fray, trying to get a better view of it. Naturally, being a beacon for all sorts of awful luck, the battle chooses that moment to expand from two-sided to three-sided, as the Commission’s internal factions decide that a crisis of this magnitude is the opportune time to begin cannibalizing itself, and he is caught in the crossfire of it. 

He is saved, when Luther comes barreling around the corner, catching him under the arms and bearing the brunt of a projectile blast that rolls across his back.

“Oh, hey. Thanks for that." Klaus grimaces at the steam rising from Luther's back, "Guess that means your shirt’s kinda fucked, huh?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Luther grimaces at the uncomfortable feeling of having all the fur on his back singed off at once. His skin won't break, but it'll bruise terribly.

“... Can you put me down now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Luther sets Klaus on the floor, gives his head a slightly awkward pat, and then they’re back to it. 

Diego, who narrowly avoids getting caught in the crossfire of two painfully identical-looking factions, skids around a corner, yelling out, mostly to himself, "What the hell is _this?"_

"Office politics," replies Five dispassionately. Diego's come across the stairwell where Five has landed, and he finds his brother peering at a map directory thoughtfully.

Upon seeing him, Diego swells with the unsinkable urge to kick Five's ass.

 _"Five?_ Where the hell have _you_ been?” Diego snaps at Five, gesturing at nothing in particular with a blade. Five waves him off dismissively.

Five’s staring at the map, studying it for a moment, before tensing, like a watchdog who’s just heard a cry. He looks up at Diego, eyes bright. It’s like a lightbulb’s flashed on in his brain, and his mouth spreads wide in an awful grin; he’s determined something terrible, something delightful, and Diego takes a step backwards.

“I’ll be right back,” Five says, leaning down and harvesting a machine gun from the corpse of an agent at his feet, before vanishing in a flash.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Diego mutters.

Five pays him little mind; he has a very important itch to scratch, and this is the perfect time to do it.

The Board of Directors, as all spineless leaders do in times of absolute crisis, have opted to huddle together in a bunker, flattened like sardines against the far wall with their weapons at their sides. They’d welded the six-inch-thick metal door shut behind them, and were fairly confident that whatever rogue faction that had beset the Commission would be incapable of reaching them, safe in the bowels of their home office.

They are right, for the most part. Most people couldn’t possibly find a way inside. For instance, the rogue faction of dissenting Commission employees attempting to stage a coup are currently pounding on the door with a fire axe, trying to force their way in to clean out the Board, without much success.

Five Hargreeves, if it isn’t obvious enough, is _not_ most people.

So when he flashes in from six floors up, landing nimble as a cat atop the long oaken meeting desk in the center of the room, they simply don’t expect him at all. 

There’s a split second, in which the Board members claw wildly for their guns, and flick off the safeties.

In that split second, Five unloads a barrage of bullets, spraying quickly and efficiently from left to right. 

The red mist parts, and Five inspects his handiwork, the dozens of bodies hemorrhaging blood, slumped over in their rolling chairs. Then, at the shower of sparks sputtering at the head of the table, at the robot body twitching in mechanical panic. At the little orange goldfish, spinning in frenzied circles in his bubble-head.

 _Not so tough now,_ Five thinks.

Five, in spite of himself, is feeling the corners of his mouth curl up in a ferocious grin. 

He stalks around the side of the table, taking care to stagger his steps, to make sure Carmichael can see him coming, that he has time to be afraid.

Five’s body, the one that he has now, the one that’s been aging so strangely, is free of the modifications Carmichael had inflicted upon him. In this body, he is free of the impulses that his brain had been rewired to accept as natural, the worst instincts known to man, the one he’d had to wake every day to and fight to swallow down deep, lest they seize control of him. Most of those terrible urges only appear in his mind now in flashes, like the appearance of mostly-forgotten ghosts.

Just this once, he decides, he’s going to indulge the worst ones he can imagine.

Five shatters the glass-head with the butt of his rifle, reaching into the water to seize the little shit in his fist, to squeeze until his eyes pop loose of their sockets.

He tilts back his head, and swallows Carmichael whole, feeling a rush of vicious glee overcome him. 

Five reaches down coolly, flicking the handkerchief out of Carmichael’s pocket, and dabbing at his mouth and face, blotting the blood away. 

Then, he tosses it over his shoulders, and swings the heavy bunker door open.

And immediately dodges the heavy swing of a fire axe.

Five raises his gun, then hesitates.

The rogue faction had made its way down to them, are waving their hands up in surrender, and Five is face to face with none other than... 

_Dot?_

He glowers at her, and she goes white, saying insistently, “No, no! I’m here to help you!”

“Yeah? How so?”

“You’ve seen friendly fire among us, yes?”

Five shrugs.

“Well, you see, Number Five, I’m a part of this movement, the one that’s looking to replace the Board and steer the Commission in a newer, safer direction.” Dot puffs her chest, like a peacock might. “This is Herb.”

The man next to her tips his hat. Five recognizes him; he’d been one of the analysts he’d been seated next to during his ten-minute stint working with the Commission. He recalls the funny looks Herb had kept shooting him; perhaps he hadn’t been suspicious of his motives at all. Perhaps he’d been planning this coup even then. Perhaps both.

“Our resistance movement’s decided to appoint Herb as Acting Chair,” explains Dot.

“Alright,” says Five tersely.

“Oh, Number Five, it’s so good to meet you,” Herb beams, “And thank you very much for handling the business of taking care of the Board for us.” 

The three of them peer back into the bunker, and for a moment, Five discerns the dripping of blood from the revolving chairs, the soft, wet slapping sounds of organs hitting the floor. 

“We’re going to turn a new leaf at the Temps Commission,” Herb insists, “Get us all a nice, clean start. Make some big changes, the ones that are _long_ overdue. And we’re thinking that we could offer you and your family clemency for everything, given how much of a help you’ve been.” Herb sticks out his hand. “We’ll send you home and we’ll stay out of your hair. What do you think, Mr. Five, you like the sound of that?”

“Sure,” replies Five, before he promptly shoots the both of them in the head.

Do they really think he’s that _stupid?_

New leadership, his ass. The fact that they want this institution to stay is proof enough that they’ll never redeem it. 

Five steps over their bodies, and makes for the distant thundering of gunfire, for his family. He doesn’t look back once.

* * *

There are still a few scatterings of gunfire somewhere in the smoke, but it’s a safe bet at this point that the Academy has won, Five concludes, passing through the smoldering ruins, through the shell of a building whose roof has just caved in upon itself. 

The air stinks of smoke, of plaster, of blood and gore, and he keeps tripping over everything-- chunks of drywall, roof tiles, splinters of door or ceiling beam, crushed bodies. Most had died in the collapse of the campus itself; turned to paste by the initial explosions, burned or suffocated in the blazes that’d sprung up in the buildings, as quickly as though they’d been tinder boxes, or crushed by falling walls or beams or the shoes of their stampeding coworkers. Five knows for certain that the analysts’ floors, which were notoriously overcrowded, are particularly grisly. 

_So much for safety precautions,_ he’s thinking coldly, when he finds Diego, hurriedly scavenging a pair of shoes from a corpse.

“Should I ask?”

“No. And just to be clear, when we get out of here, I’m beating your ass for leaving us in the sixties like that. Where the hell are we now, anyway?” 

“Upstate New York. April fifteenth, 1955. Sometime between nine and five.” Five peers up at the overcast sky, looking for the faintly bright blur of the sun. “Three? Four?”

Diego decides he’s not going to push it any further, and climbs to his feet.

Gunfire echoes in the distance, somewhere ahead of them.

“Who do you think that is?”

“Let’s find out.”

They start running, and get close enough to make out the familiar hulking silhouette of Luther, and a smaller, slighter one by his side, Allison’s, when an explosion of drywall cuts them off. 

A slender shape is coming like a cannonball through the wall, tearing through plaster as though it were paper. 

In the middle of the noxious white cloud of drywall dust, an angular shape stalks towards them.

It’s Lila. 

She’s coated in soot and debris dust, painted gray from head to toe, heaving deep, furious breaths. Her eyes are blazing, and when she lays her gaze on Five, she stills, coiling the way a tiger might right before it lunges. 

“Hey Lila,” Diego says.

“Who?” asks Five.

Lila practically seethes with rage. In return for her services in 1963, Lila had been promised a promotion, and she’d been promised Number Five, all to herself. Seeing as the Commission is literally burning to the ground around her, she doesn’t seem like she’s going to get the former, but she’ll be damned if she can’t get her hands on the latter.

“You killed my mother,” Lila snarls. “You burned her alive.”

Five stares at her, squinting in confusion. “Who…”

He looks at her stringy black hair, her large, dark eyes.

And he remembers seeing it before, seeing it in grayscale in a photo frame, in the center of the Handler’s trophy case. 

Oh. She’s the Handler’s daughter.

Oh _shit._

Lila lunges at him, brandishing a knife that Diego realizes is one of his own, one of the ones he’d thrown at her hours ago, and Five drops backwards, through a rift in spacetime. Before the light closes in front of her, Five winces; she’d managed to graze his nose with the very edge of her blade. 

Diego’s alone with her then, slinging knife after knife at her, and…

Watching them simply curve away from her, _around_ her, as she raises a hand.

Diego stares at her in shock.

And then he remembers: that fight they’d had in the hotel when she’d somehow sidestepped his knife without moving an inch, the way she’d somehow come unaffected out of the blast zone of the assassin’s bullets...

“You have a power too,” he breathes. “You’re like me.”

“Oh, no,” Lila fixes him with a slick, cold smile. “I’m a lot _better_ than you.” 

She flicks her own knife down the hall at him, and it finds him perfectly, sinking into the muscle of his shoulder and pinning him like a dead butterfly to the wall. An explosion of pain bursts in his arm. 

_God,_ Diego thinks, recalling how many criminals he’s done this very thing to. _This really sucks._

He draws up his leg, ready to kick Lila away as she charges down the hall towards him.

But then she’s caught by the collar by a large, powerful hand, tugged backwards sharply.

It’s Luther.

He swings Lila off the ground, making to throw her over his shoulder.

But then he… doesn’t.

Lila digs her heels into the ground, whipping around to catch him by the arm and…

Diego gapes.

She’s thrown him through the wall, as easily as if he were a ragdoll.

 _What is going on?_ he thinks, staring back to the wall from which she’d come.

The wall hadn’t been weak, he realizes; Lila had been _strong._ She’d shattered through it exactly the way Luther would have. 

Then come Klaus, Ben and Five, skidding in from around a corner, dodging a shower of particle board tiles from above. They’re grabbing at Diego in a swarm of hands, tugging him off the wall, tearing the knife out of his shoulder, but he isn’t looking at them at all.

At the end of the hall, Allison leaps up behind Lila, is leaning in to whisper something in her ear… and then she falls, crumpling to the ground.

The gunfire has ceased now, and despite the crackling of the fire around them, and the groaning of the building as it starts to collapse, Diego can hear the grating, gravelly gasps fighting their way from Allison’s mouth.

“She rumored her,” Diego says, watching Luther crawl out from where he’d been thrown, staring at the look of abject terror on his face, a look he’s never _seen_ before. He hadn’t heard her do it, but it _must’ve_ happened, there’s simply no other explanation...

“What?”

“She’s like _us,”_ Diego says. “She’s like _all_ of us.”

He shakes loose of his brothers, prying a knife out of the wall, and starts after Lila.

“She’s a copycat,” Klaus mumbles, staring after her.

“Yeah, Klaus, I can see that,” snaps Five. “She’s got powers too. _Great.”_

“How?” wonders Ben, mostly to himself. “Dad never said there were others like us?”

“No,” Klaus says, snatching Five by the shoulder and pointing, “I mean, she’s… _look_ at her. She’s _copying_ all our powers.”

Five stares, at Diego, hurling his knives furiously, one after the other. At Lila, who bats them away with a slick, cold smile. 

_Yes,_ he thinks. _That’s exactly what she’s doing, she’s imitating him. She’s taking his power and turning it against him. And if she can do it with Diego, and with Luther and Allison, that means..._

“We can’t let her near Vanya,” he says.

“Where is she?” he hisses to Klaus.

“I just saw her,” Ben says. “She was headed out towards the lawn.”

Lila’s dark eyes dart to him, then out the window, and she flashes a hungry smile.

Five’s heart stops. They were too loud.

Diego takes the toe of Lila’s boot to his chin, and then she’s balling her fists, twin points of shivering blue light blazing from them. She stares at the pack of Hargreeves at the end of the hall, grinning in awful triumph, and then she’s gone in a flash.

Five flashes away after her, and the remaining siblings crawl to their feet, limping after them, breaking out of the building and racing across the campus.

They find Vanya, after a moment, with Five beside her, and begin staring around wildly, searching for a swish of dark hair somewhere amid the smoke. 

But Lila never appears.

Teleportation, it must be noted, is a power dependent on precision, on careful calculation of where and when one plans to land, accounting for variables like additional passengers the teleporter plans to bring along, and for obstacles in one’s path, such as doors and tangible things the unpracticed teleporter may find themselves impaled upon when they land.

Five, who’d spent years of his life honing his technique, has grown extremely comfortable with the split-second calculations a spatial jump requires, and is adept at telling them apart from temporal jumps, which he is infamously less-masterful at.

Lila, who had never teleported once in her life before this very moment, is decidedly less knowledgeable; to put it simply, she has jumped through space, but also through time.

Five realizes it immediately, remembering the white tinge to the solar flash that had engulfed her, a shade of brightness he’s only ever observed when he’d leapt in time. _She’d made a rookie mistake,_ he concludes, _and she will not be coming back. Not as long as we don’t linger here._

“We’re safe,” he says. “For now.”

* * *

The battle is over.

The sky opens above them, drenching the Home Office in a relentless sheet of rain for the very first time; no one at the Commission is left to turn back the clock, and for the first time in forever, the clock has struck 5:01 P.M. 

Without the threat of enemies to draw their attention, the Hargreeves siblings are able to truly acknowledge each other for the first time, looking one another up and down. 

Ben is already fading from sight, the stress of conjuring having taken its toll on Klaus, who sinks to sit on the grass, rubbing his forehead with his palm. But in the second before he goes, he looks at Vanya, and gives her a smile that nearly knocks her off her feet.

As their brothers glance around warily, checking again, if they’re safe, if there isn’t some sort of ambush lurking just beyond that fallen pillar, Vanya sees Allison for the first time in days, and feels her heart tremble in her chest at the sight of her, soot-streaked and with angry red lines striping across her cheeks, the remnants of having been gagged for hours on end.

She draws in a deep breath, tensing.

Then Allison’s rushing at her, to envelop her into a tight hug. 

The rest of her family falls in after her, and Vanya doesn’t melt into their arms, but she doesn’t shake them off or rain hellfire down on them, so each of them individually decides to count it as progress. It will take time, for them to settle into each other, time that they cannot rush, time they are all more than willing to give.

“Alright,” says Five, unsettled by the excessive affection, and Klaus bursts out laughing at the different tone to his voice, suddenly realizing that he’s grown since they’ve last been together. 

“Oh _no!”_ he says, unable to resist the urge to croon mockingly at him, “Looks like widdle Number Five can’t go to choirboy practice anymore!”

Five, whose ears burn bright red, is struck by a sudden rush of gratitude that he’d been apart from Klaus as long as he’d been. He roughly untangles himself from the group, which promptly collapses in a squirming mass of limbs, and starts off towards the building he knows will house the briefcases, his soaked socks squelching in their shoes.

His family fall in after him, and to Five’s disappointment, they come up empty-handed; Vanya’s destruction had been so great that it had leveled most of the buildings, and reduced the rest to smoking husks. The briefcases, having been safeguarded due to the shortage of the technology, have been utterly buried in the rubble, and he thinks it’s highly doubtful that any survived.

“Shit,” Five grumbles, kicking childishly at a hunk of concrete in frustration and declaring to the family that they won’t be returning to the present through such a means. 

As the family begin bickering about the likelihood that Five might be able to carry them home himself (“Absolutely _not,”_ snaps Diego), and begin rolling inevitably towards their only true option left, Klaus toes at a dismembered arm on the ground. 

_Vanya,_ he’s thinking, _has popped her battle cherry, and boy was it bloody._

“... Klaus? _Klaus?”_

He perks his head up. Everyone’s waiting for him.

“What do you think? And Ben?”

“What do I _what?”_

“About heading to Dad,” says Allison. “I mean, he’s here, right, in 1955? He bought the house then?”

“Yeah, he’s had it since the forties, I think,” says Ben, who Klaus pointedly avoids eye contact with. Now, without the excuse of the heat of battle to distract them, they're right back to being smothered by that discomfort they'd driven themselves into. 

“Great,” Allison says, “So. We stick with Luther’s plan.”

Luther shoots a pointed look at Diego, who glares back.

“Oh.” Klaus sighs. “Well, I hate the bastard, but is that the only option we have left?”

“It’s the simplest way forward,” Five sighs. “The one that’s least likely to fuck us all up.”

Beside him, Vanya frowns, but says nothing.

“How would that even work?” Diego asks, “Changing the past, I mean.”

“We show up, tell Dad what happens, and…” Luther looks to Five. “Then what?”

Five frowns. “Well, best I figure, we’ll have to take a chance at jumping back ourselves. We’ll aim for 2019, for the day after the apocalypse, and we’ll just hope the changes have come into effect.” 

The answer isn’t particularly satisfying, but they decide it’s their best option.

The Hargreeves siblings opt to save Five’s energy for the time jump, willing not to chance the possibility that fatigue had been what caused their scattering the first time. Instead, they hot-wire one of the few surviving vehicles parked in the Commission’s company parking lot, and settle into a miserably cramped road trip.

The Commission, Five tells them, is in upstate New York, so they plot their route accordingly. They marathon the drive, only stopping once in Syracuse, to eat at a restaurant that will serve Allison and Diego, where they have the cook hand them sandwiches and Cokes to eat in the car; as bad as the sixties are, the fifties are even worse, so they only stop for gas after that, pulling over only once to take turns relieving themselves behind a sycamore when no one seems to be on the road around them.

They drive through the night, Allison, Diego, Luther and Five all taking turns behind the wheel. With six people and one ghost packed into the car, they’re all crammed together, three to a seat, in each other’s laps, an arrangement that makes the Hargreeves siblings especially irritable. There are several raucous screaming matches, the most vicious of which having started as a result of Allison nearly elbowing Diego’s eye out, in the midst of trying to wrap her hair, which culminates in the car nearly swerving off the road entirely. 

But none of them suggest splitting up. 

Finally, they see the flat blue line of Lake Michigan on the horizon, and they know they’re home.

In 1955, Reginald Hargreeves has not purchased the entirety of the city block that will become their family home; the tenement building on the other side of the block isn’t owned by him yet, nor the brownstones, nor the museum that sandwich the mansion. But the mansion itself is, and though there are no stone lions yet, no gate bolted shut against visitors, the umbrella’s still emblazoned in the frosted glass of the door. 

“We’re home,” Luther says quietly, and a rumble of tired, half-hearted, nervous laughter rolls through the group. 

They stand on the steps of the home of eccentric millionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves, six bedraggled young people and one ghost, home in time for dinner, and Luther brings up his fist to rap politely on the door. 

There’s no answer.

Luther swallows. And tries again. And again.

“Is there a doorbell?” asks Klaus. “Ring the doorbell.”

“Shouldn’t we just _walk_ in? It’s our house.”

“It’s not our house _yet,_ Five.” 

“Five, jump to the other side, and--”

“--No, I’ll just knock again--” Luther insists, but Diego has jostled his way to the front of the crowd.

He reaches up to pound the door with his fist, when it flies open in front of him.

“I’m so sorry, I only just heard you,” says a voice so strikingly familiar that it shuts the quarreling siblings right up. They’ve heard it before, chiding them for running indoors, cooing reassurances about scraped knees and harsh words, cheerily announcing that dinner is served. “I was upstairs, and the house is just so _big,_ and--”

It’s--

“M… Mom?”

Mom steps out onto the curb, arms weighed down by a set of heavy books and notebooks, a keychain dangling from her fingertip. 

She cocks her head at Diego, her ash-blonde hair drooping in a bright curtain over her shoulder. “Haven’t heard _that_ one before,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him, just a bit flirtily. 

No, he realizes, this isn’t Mom, this is _Grace._

Now that he’s seen it, he can’t unsee it: Diego notes the lines etched lightly around her eyes and mouth, the beauty mark on her chin, the way her hair, though blonde, is darker and straight and loose in a way that Mom’s never was. She’s even _dressed_ differently, in something far snugger than anything Mom had ever worn, with a lab coat draped over one arm.

“You’re catching me on my way out, actually,” she says in a voice that is Grace’s, but deeper, jingling the keys in her fingers, and Diego stares at her blunt red-painted nails. “I’m all done working with Reggie today.”

 _“Reggie?”_ squawks Klaus. 

Ben, who has gathered exactly what Grace is implying with the use of such a familiar nickname, is deeply grateful that ghosts can’t feel nausea. He had a weak stomach in life, and is positive that had he a physical body, he’d be keeling into the street to try and expunge the image that has just been conjured in his mind. 

“Yes, I’m running over the primatology reports with him. I thought you…” Grace frowns. “No, you’re not the courier from the company, are you?” Her gaze sweeps across the conspicuous group gathered in front of her, and it seems it's suddenly dawned on her that Diego isn’t the only person at the door. “Now I can’t recall, which party are you? He said he was taking meetings all week, you know, people are just _flyin’_ in and out of here all the time, but I think I just must be misremembering if he has plans for someone tonight...” 

Diego isn’t listening, as she descends the steps, and clicks off down the sidewalk. It feels like the gears in his brain have ground to a halt. 

There’s an engagement ring on Grace’s finger.

Whispers about it rustle through the siblings, all staring after her, stunned that their mother had been based upon a real person at best, or given that one must never assume the best from Reginald Hargreeves, that she was a literal Stepford Wife. 

“Well,” says Luther, “That was a lot.”

* * *

When Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric millionaire-who-is-not-yet-a-billionaire, treads down the winding steps from his study to the dining hall, he expects to take his dinner alone.

Instead, he finds himself greeted by seven strange guests, one of them being blue and translucent, all seated in the chairs they would occupy as children forty years later.

“What is the meaning of this?” he barks, turning to one of the servants, his face turning a very interesting shade of purple. 

The servant in question, who would otherwise have leapt a foot in the air at the sound of her employer’s anger, simply shrugs, and carries on pouring Reginald’s wine. Allison, who had **heard a rumor that you’ve invited us for dinner,** had guaranteed that. 

Hearing no sniveling answer, Reginald rounds on his unexpected guests, staring them all down critically, taking note of their singed and rumpled clothing, their bruise-battered unwashed faces and their odd demeanors. “Who might you be?” 

They look at each other, each daring the other with their gaze to be the first to speak.

Luther takes it upon himself to do so. As the man who’d devised this plan in the first place, he feels he has a certain duty to see it through. 

He takes in a deep breath. Dad isn’t a good man, but he’s a reasonable one. He’s a strategist, and he appreciates knowing all the variables well in advance. And what’s more, he’d shaped his children from birth to save the world from an impending apocalypse. It simply doesn’t make sense that he would not listen. 

“My name is Luther Hargreeves,” he begins, “And that’s Diego, and Allison, and Klaus, and Five, and Vanya, and that ghost over there is Ben.”

Each of his siblings nods tersely at their father, watching him with expressions that ranged from blatantly-plastic smiles to thinly-veiled disdain. Only Vanya has her face twisted in a seething scowl. 

“And we’re your children from the future,” Luther continues. 

Their father lifts his nose to them, to glare at them through his monocle. 

“We time-traveled here, from the year 2019, to warn you about the apocalypse, and to tell you how to stop it.”

Reginald slides down, into his seat, his great gray brow furrowed like a screech owl’s. 

Luther swallows, glancing over at each of the siblings. His eyes rest on Allison, who stares back at him, her mouth pressed into a nervous line. 

There’s no clear way to go from here, no road map he’d written in his mind while sitting on a bench in a bus station in Dallas, but they’ve argued, back and forth, over and over on the long drive down to the city, about how to tell Dad about the apocalypse. About what must be said, to ensure that the end does not arrive.

Five had said to them, before they’d scattered into the sixties, that fixing Vanya was the key to saving the world, and that had won out in the end; the consensus the siblings had agreed upon, is that the trouble all stems from their father’s decision to exclude Vanya. That if he hadn’t drugged her, that if he hadn’t isolated her, then the world would not have gone up in flames. 

So, Luther tells their father as much. He tells him about their powers, about the Umbrella Academy, about the years spent training tirelessly to save the world. All the siblings find the courage to add their voices to his, to tell him how they’d failed, how they’d splintered off, Five at first, then Ben, then the Academy had imploded. All, save Vanya, who simply stares at him from the end of the table, like she wants to leap across it and claw his eyes out.

She speaks once, during the dinner. 

It’s when they’ve come to the subject of that last week before the world ended, when Luther is talking about the cage their father had constructed beneath the house, the medication, the rumor (at its mention, Allison sinks low in her chair), and how it had all been to suppress Vanya’s powers.

“Didn’t work,” Vanya says coldly, and her eyes shine wolfishly from the end of the table. 

It’s all she says, and it’s enough.

One might be expecting a confrontation, in which the Hargreeves siblings stare down their father and voraciously disown him and all his teachings, declaring how terrible and wrong he was for harming them so terribly, and vowing to never again have anything to do with him.

One must remember, that the Hargreeves children are far from such a point. One must remember that each and every sibling, even the most vehemently hostile to their father, earnestly wants to believe that it will work, that their father, after hearing exactly how he had failed, will take the necessary corrective measures to save the world.

So, when Reginald looks across the table, to stare each and every one of them in the eye, and says “It will be done,” they all release a collective breath of relief, and choose to believe that it will be so. 

Then, they come to the business of their homecoming.

Having no briefcase to transport by, they have no choice but to let Five jump them himself, so they shuffle begrudgingly into the courtyard, and prepare for whatever hell he unleashes.

He feels less uncertain about this jump; he's devised this very equation before, the one that would take them to late March, 2019, and now that he understands what variable had lead to his body's current state of... wrongness, he knows how to counteract it. And aside from that, it might be easier, he supposes, to jump forward than back. After all, the first time he’d made a temporal jump, he’d passed through the years as quickly as though it’d been nothing more than a door left ajar. Perhaps it’s easier to swim with the flow of the universe, rather than against it. 

Though, Five knows, even if it weren’t easier, they’ll still try it. 

They move to take each others’ hands, but then Five shakes his head. “Hold onto me this time,” he says, and they oblige, moving to take his hands, and to hold tightly to his arms. 

Five balls his fists until his knuckles turn white, gritting his teeth and rending a tear in spacetime above them. The sight of a pulsing storm of temporal energy, cycloning down to swallow them is familiar now, but it is beautiful nonetheless, and the siblings are still wide-eyed and tense, as static runs its fingers through their hair and flows along their bodies as if it were rain. They are rising up, once again in the center of a prism of time, and it is reflecting them into someplace new.

Reginald, watching them from a third-floor window, stares, wide-eyed at the sight of the seven strangers, vanishing in a flash. Such a sight is so unexpected, so peculiar, so utterly extraordinary, that he quietly acknowledges that perhaps there’d been some truth to what they’d said after all. Perhaps he must assume that the strangers _are_ who they say they are.

So, he decides to make some changes.

* * *

On the fifteenth hour of the first of April, 2019, the Hargreeves siblings arrive, scattering spatially, but not temporally.

Five’s method of teleportation is far more undisciplined than that of the briefcase; rather than transporting one’s entire body to a point on the timeline, regardless of one’s physical presence in them, his power operates by a different rule. Chiefly, that if one teleports to a time in which one’s physical body does not exist, like for example, a person born in 1989 who travels to 1963, they will land as they are, having no body to drift into. However, if one teleports to a time in which one’s physical body does exist, one’s consciousness will teleport into their body, in the place at which they are physically located. 

Allison finds herself flying backwards from her seat at her vanity, slamming her backwards into her plush carpet. Tiny bottles of nail polish and tubes of makeup shower down on her from where her knees had knocked into the underside of her vanity, and there’s a painful prickling in her head.

She groans, reaching up to rub at the ache, and freezes, feeling her hair; it isn’t straightened any longer, but braided tightly to her scalp, drawn in a tight flat knot at the nape of her neck.

Allison jerks to her feet, peering into the vanity, wincing at the smear of deep red that trails off her chin, the casualty of having teleported into her body in the midst of applying makeup. She snatches a hand mirror off the table, and twists her arm around to peer at the back of her head with it, to see for herself that yes, her hair has changed, and she squawks in surprise, finding that it has been dyed _purple._

There’s something else, around her neck.

Allison reaches below the neck of her uniform collar, and tugs out the locket from where it’d been hiding under her shirt. She stares at it, tracing the engraved lettering with a trembling finger, then draws it up to her lips to kiss, her eyes filling with tears.

There’s a crash downstairs, and it stirs her from her spell.

She starts running. 

The sound had stemmed from the dining room, where she finds Diego, coughing up a chunk of jello that his body had been in the process of chewing when his consciousness had leapt into it. In his panic, he’d sent his plate shattering across the floor. 

“Diego?”

Allison’s voice is warm and sonorous, and as he comes crashing in to tackle her into an embrace in the kitchen hall, she claps her hand to her throat, feeling for a scar that simply isn’t there any longer. 

From the door leading to the courtyard, in streams Five with leaves stuck to his shoulders. To his great misery, he is still in his teenage body, and he races into the parlor to find the very same oil portrait that had announced his vanishing still hanging above the mantle. 

_Some things,_ he supposes, _still happen._

There’s a newspaper, abandoned on the low table in front of one of the antique couches, and Five unfolds it quickly, reading the date and crying out in triumph. 

He’s waving it above his head, crying out, “We’ve done it! We’re safe! We stopped it!” when Allison and Diego rush in after him. 

There’s a clattering of footsteps, and then come Klaus and Luther. 

Klaus had wobbled from his precarious perch atop the washing machine, where his body, pre-temporal possession, had evidently been doing laundry, and the pipe that had been in his lips a second earlier had shattered on the concrete floor of the basement. 

He’d been content to lay there for a moment, but then had come a grunt in pain from somewhere above him, which had sent him running up, into one of the Academy weight rooms, to discover that Luther had landed in the midst of strength training, and had borne the weight of a hundred-pound barbel crunching down on his chest. 

They’d followed the same shout of victory, which had reunited them with the others, and now, the five siblings crowd over the paper, pouring over the date again and again, passing _yes, it’s over, yes, we’ve done, yes, we’re safe, the world is safe,_ back and forth between each other. 

Then, they hear a voice from upstairs, cursing.

It’s familiar, yet different, the voice of someone they know and love, who’d never gotten to let it deepen to the tone it is now. 

“Ben,” whispers Luther, as if saying it out loud might scare him off.

There’s a moment where the five of them let the word hover over them, filling the air of the room.

Then they’re all crashing up the stairs, charging into the children’s hallway, to find their brother, alive and as old as they, running his hands along a welt in his forehead.

Ben, who hadn’t totally realized that he was tangible again had, to put it delicately, slammed face-first into his bedroom door while attempting to sprint through it. 

He has hardly enough time to process that he has felt _pain,_ that he _feels,_ that he is _alive,_ before his siblings tackle him into a viciously affectionate group hug. 

In the center of it all, Ben manages to catch a glimpse of himself in his wall mirror, and blinks. “Oh, what the _fuck?”_

He’d sort of expected to look different; after all, he’d died at seventeen, and he should be twenty-nine now, so the wisps of facial hair aren’t totally unexpected (rather, he’s a little pleased that he can finally grow it). But he has to admit, he didn’t expect the long scar carved across his face.

Ben barely has time to pull back and ask about it, before the siblings are reunited with another of their ghosts. 

“Excessive displays of affection,” comes the high, sharp voice of their father from the doorway, making the siblings spring apart in shock. “Are absolutely _unacceptable!”_

Reginald then fixes his eyes on Five, regarding him coolly for a moment before saying disdainfully, “Well, it’s about _time_ you got back.”

Then, he continues on his way to his study, content that the pale faces of his children, and the way their jaws had flapped, were proof enough that they’d taken his criticism to heart.

Now that the sheer exhilaration of homecoming has been ripped out from beneath them like a fine Persian rug, they realize: They’ve forgotten Vanya. 

She’s not among them. She hadn’t slipped into their tangle quietly, she isn’t hovering hopefully in the doorway, waiting for an invitation to join the embrace. 

The siblings charge out of Ben’s bedroom, filing through hallways stacked high with Umbrella Academy memorabilia to search. Some call out her name, some peer into doorways, expecting that it’s just taken longer for her to find them, given the gargantuan nature of the house. 

Five passes by the portrait hall, intending to make his way downstairs, when he pauses. 

The portraits. There are _more_ of them. They stretch on and on and on. 

Five looks at the one on the end closest to him, the most recent of them, with One and Two and Three and Four and Six, all standing confidently together. And then, at the far end, where his smug thirteen-year-old face leers back at him, grinning like he knows an awful secret.

 _The Academy never broke up,_ he realizes, leaning down to note the date engraved in the frame of the portrait. _This one’s dated this year._

A chorus of murmuring erupts behind him. His siblings have found the portraits as well, are staring down at the uniforms they’re wearing with new eyes, now terribly aware of exactly what it means. That their father, even knowing exactly how much pain he would cause them, would have done it anyway.

But there’s something… _different,_ about the paintings. 

Five treads closer, and notes the different arrangement of the children, the way they’re all crammed together, because all seven--

Seven. There are seven children in that very first painting. There’s One and Two and Three and Four and Five and Six and...

The mask obscures her face, but he knows exactly who it is.

Which makes her conspicuous absence from the last portrait in the line all the more terrifying.

“Guys?” he says, his voice cracking with panic, “Where the hell is Vanya?”

* * *

Vanya blinks. She'd closed her eyes, clinging to Five's forearm one minute, and opened them to find herself on a stiff mattress in the next, her arm over her face, as if the dim light from the lamp at her bedside were bothering her.

The first thing she focuses on, when her eyes adjust to the dimness, is the umbrella insignia branded into it.

Vanya jerks up, claws her way out of the threadbare sheets she's tangled in, and stares wildly around.

She seems to be in a hotel room, a dingy, poorly-lit one with the window so thoroughly boarded up that when she leaps up and races over to it, she cannot even make out a crack of light from outside. Vanya cannot make out where in the world she could possibly be. Without any idea where she might be, it's as if her room is just floating, in the middle of the void, and she is the only person in the universe, an idea that terrifies Vanya deeply.

She finds herself stumbling when she moves again, set off-balance by the sudden arrival of sound in her right ear clashing with the horribly familiar numbness clouding her brain. 

Vanya tugs a little pamphlet off of the spindly little desk in the corner of her strangely generic-looking room, out from under an empty room service tray, and flips it open. Upon reading its contents, she realizes exactly how fucked she is. 

As stated previously, when one time-travels, briefcaseless, to a time in which they already physically exist, one's consciousness will be transferred into their body, in the place at which they are physically located. While each of her siblings, sans Number Five, who is absent in this timeline altogether, had occupied a similar space in the Hargreeves mansion, Vanya has found herself a world away, checked into Hotel Oblivion. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, we're at the end. As was the case with the previous fic in this series, I'm not thrilled about a lot of the fic, but I'm quite happy with how it ended.
> 
> So. Season two. No thanks. So much of the season feels like a soft retcon of the first, specifically to cater to the fanbase, which I'm massively displeased with. Among many other things,  
> -The years-long timeskip was unnecessary and mostly existed to quietly gloss over the characters' post-season one selves.  
> -I hate the amnesia plotline (and, since Harlan and Sissy are inextricably tied to it and Vanya's character assassination, them too.)  
> -I liked Raymond but found him ultimately unnecessary (to such an extent that if you remove him from the story, Allison's freed up to participate in the main plot... so, snip snip), and I found the civil rights plotline to be incredibly lacking, especially in how the writers literally forgot that Diego and Lila would have had to deal with segregation too, how they encourage the audience to chide Allison for punishing a racist who tried to kill her, and how the family does not care about her cause in the slightest. The sit-in and Allison's rescue of Ray were great. The rest was not.  
> -I think Lila's a great concept, but her execution fell flat because the show tried to do too many things with her too quickly, instead of letting those ideas breathe (the end result: if S2 were a fanfic, I wouldn't hesitate to refer to Lila as a Mary Sue. Because it's not, the most I can say is that she's a poorly-written character whose execution sincerely pisses me off to such an extent that every time she appears I find myself groaning and rolling my eyes, especially when considering what she could've been if the writers didn't rip all the family's toys away from them, hand them to her, and then warp their characterization to make them instantly love her for it).  
> -The JFK plot was pointless bloat.
> 
> In general, I think that so much of the season just clumsily retreads the same ground of season one (oh look, another apocalypse Vanya causes, oh look, the family's estranged all over again, oh look, Five's got to deal with Handler all over again, ad infinitum), rather than picking up and running in a new direction.
> 
> I can't tell if the creatives sincerely didn't have a plan and season one was a fluke, if this was the plan and it just sucked the whole time, if they had a plan but threw it away for audience approval as soon as they realized they had a hit series, or if the powers-that-be at Netflix compromised the creative team so much that this is what they ended up with, rather than what they actually wanted. 
> 
> Regardless, going forward, I don't have any faith in the people making story decisions for the series, and therefore in the series itself anymore. I can't engage with it actively, invest my feelings or expect anything of it, because S2 has proven that the show will punish you for doing so. They had a chance to deepen the story, and instead they hollowed it out to turn it into a fanservice vehicle, and any moments of depth here and going forward, barring a massive internal creative re-reshifting, are most certainly the exception rather than the rule. Those moments of depth and complexity are wonderful, but we shouldn't have to grasp for them when given what this show originally was, they should be a guarantee, because those moments were the point. Now it seems there isn't one.
> 
> After season one aired, I was absolutely over the moon and ravenous for more of the story. The season was messy in places, but otherwise very intelligently constructed, ambitious and more than anything, a breath of fresh air. As of S2, the fresh air went stale, the ambition turned to bloat, and the intelligence was thrown out the window for fanservice. They ripped out the heart, stomped on it, smeared it across the pavement, then turned to the audience and said, "see? We did it for you! Now say nice things about us on Twitter!" I love season one, and probably always will, but season two? Keep it. Season three? I'm numb and I expect only the worst. 
> 
> While the first fic in this series was absolutely a love letter to the season it was heavily based upon, this one... is not. All respect to you if you liked it, but I didn't. In fact, I sincerely hated most of it. This is my way of working out my feelings on the matter, hence the highly self-indulgent nature of this fic (and this long and bitter author's note), and I'm hoping that if you're similarly dissatisfied, you might've found some of what you were looking for here.
> 
> Thanks sincerely for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the experience.
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> 
> Coming up next: an un-homecoming that's positively out of this world.


End file.
